Sportives!
Sportives! is a collection of black and white portraits of women practicing a sport represented at the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Women of all ages, of all origins, coming from all regions of France, amateurs in the first sense of Olympism. All Olympic and Paralympic sports are represented.
The artistic vision is the encounter between women's sport and the gaze of a photographer. Eric Mistler combines all the emotions created by sport with the timelessness of black and white photography. For Mistler, each shooting session is a moment of complicity and empathy with the woman practicing her sport; he offers a subtle mix of pure portraits and portraits in action. By his vision he sublimates the splendour of sport.
Text in English and French.
Born in Buenos Aires, Eric Mistler moves to Paris when he was 13. He soon becomes an independent photographer specialised in music and sport, his two other passions. His documentaries on AC/DC Let There Be Rock or on transoceanic sailor Eugène Rigidel become legendary. Eric also produces featured films such as Bruno Podalydes' Versailles Rive Gauche, winner of 1992 César for best short movie and Patrice Leconte Le Magasin des Suicides. In 2019, his first book Paris Buenos Aires is published by Kerber Verlag, followed by exhibitions in France and Argentina. The book was shortlisted for best photo book by the German bookseller association. In 2021, Eric started the project Sportives.