To reveal. Not to conceal. That's what she's all about. Since Joelle Van Autreve, after studying three-dimensional art at School of Arts/KASK in Gent, had finally entered into a collaboration with a fashion photographer, she had at the end of the sessions, she says casually, urged the models to throw off those clothes. With what had happened there at the end it had started.

A decade later, in which she also became the mother of two daughters, she has -especially in the last two years - built up an impressive photographic oeuvre, which she is now showing in an exhibition for the first time. Almost invariably nudes are central to her images. But what she wants to expose is not so much the bodies of those models, let alone that she wants to portray them as Objects of Desire. What she rather wants to capture is that sultry subcutaneous tone that she describes in words as malaise, and comes close to what was labeled Unheimlich and Uncanny by Sigmund Freud and others. And why the nudity? “Because it is simply much more powerful to see an angry woman walking around naked than dressed.”

She never limits herself to a quick snapshot of reality as it presents itself to her. There is always a staging that precedes photographing, in which everything - the location, the characters, whatever- is recorded in advance with almost maniacal precision. However, in doing so she deliberately chooses what she describes as atypical locations, rough and raw, wet and cold, unpleasant. Situations that bring the models out of balance, out of their comfort zone. This also applies to the guidelines and watchwords that she unleashes on the models, and with which she wants to convey to them what is troubling or fascinating her at that moment. Words like: denial, lie, illusion. Or simply the question to act as if they each had to do it with one leg less.