High heels, gloves, stockings and suspenders, shaven cunt that seems to stare straight at you… The pose is graphic, in all senses. But reflected in the mirror behind her head is the photographer bent to his work, objectified as he is objectifying. Who is looking at whom? The viewer’s eye begins to dance… The reflected light on the wall, the toes of her shoes, that knee bent almost at 90° as uncomfortable to behold as a swastika... Like the heroine of Bataille’s Blue of Noon – incontrovertibly associated with the red, black and white of the flags that were flying at the time the author was writing – this woman is both Dirty and Dorothea, a gift from god. The serenity of her gaze is unsettling, and reassuring.
Bataille’s Story of the Eye is also a story of balls and cunt (‘by far the loveliest of names for the vagina’). The novella’s teenage narrator anxiously watches Simone dip her hot pink lips in a cool saucer of milk for the cat, the pearly liquid dripping down her thighs to her stockings. Playful. Complicit. Innocent and louche. The essence of eroticism.
For Fontenoy, the erotic power of suspenders and stockings evokes the muscles and tendons of the human form. He collects them, even the laddered ones. Likewise the old-fashioned ties harvested second-hand and dangling – silkily full of stories – in a corner of the studio that is also his home.