This project began with a need for dialogue.

​

Lockdown happened six months after Boittiaux left an abusive two-year relationship. When the outside world closed down, she took this time to reflect on and acknowledge all the abuse she had been the victim of since the beginning of her sexuality.

​

She started by voicing it to her dad — her mother already knew — and through this discussion, Boittiaux realised how important those dialogues are and how rarely they happen. And so Avec Eux (“With Them”) was born, to photograph the bodies of the men close to her and turn them into a visible dialogue. She needed to explore a different masculinity than the one she and a lot of others have suffered from and photograph male bodies as not doing enough: poetic, vulnerable, raw.

​

She created those portraits over six months between Cherbourg and London — her hometown and her adopted home. You will find family, friends, mentors, and lovers among the images, but you will never know who is who or learn any names — those details belong to her and them. You only need to see their dance, how she captures this healing space and how men can be part of the change if they enter the dance that women will lead.

​

She didn't share the same amount of details about the project with all of the men that she photographed.

For some, like her brothers, she couldn't tell them what had happened to her, but asking them to be part of this project with her, offering her their vulnerability, was a first and crucial step in the process of her opening up to them. This made her realise how we ask victims of abuse to talk, to tell their story, without realising that it is one of the most vulnerable things for a person to do; we don't think about taking an initial step and offering our own vulnerability first.

​

This is what Avec Eux is about. Whether they knew the full extent of the work or not, all of these men were prepared to get in front of the camera because it mattered to her. So, in both French and English, she decided to guide them all the same way by showing them the same three poses — hands on their faces, chest and belly. Each gave their own interpretation of these three poses and, from those, glimpses of their personality would appear.

​

During these photo shoots, the men shared different thoughts and emotions. One told her that he was thinking about his partner during her pregnancy, whilst he had his hands on his belly. Another confessed that he didn't think that he would ever have been capable of being that vulnerable, but once in front of the camera, he felt surprisingly at ease.

She does believe that cis men are not aware of their bodies in the same way as cis women, and that for cis men to step outside of their comfort zone with their bodies is a way to open new and different conversations around consent and safe space.