These photos capture the ‘dizzying vertigo’ of growing up

The French film The Dreamlife of Angels (La vie rêvée des anges, 1998), directed by Erick Zonca, is a story of two young women stumbling through precarious lives, circling one another in a rhythm of intimacy and survival. That sense of treading the cusp of transformation sits at the heart of photographer Elise Toïdé’s latest project, a zine titled The Dream Life of Angels.

The connection to Zonca’s film was not planned. The title came from the project’s art director, Wataru Komachi, who suggested it during the project’s early stages. Only later did Toïdé reveal that she had been deeply moved by the film years before. “When I found out, I felt an intense emotion: it was like silent recognition, this unexpected connection between his vision and mine moved me deeply.”

The zine gathers portraits of four young women – Gabrielle, Dana, Ari and Cat – photographed in Paris and its outskirts. The settings are ordinary: childhood bedrooms, grassy parks, the overlooked margins of the city. Toïdé’s Paris is something outside of the typical postcard romanticism, instead using the banal backdrops to draw the focus to the sense of transition unfolding in each frame. “These ordinary places become the setting for metamorphoses. Their banality serves as a backdrop for an almost cinematic atmosphere, where intimacy and dreams intertwine,” she explains.

It’s this same mundanity that follows the subjects. There’s no overriding plot or story that’s easy to follow, but instead a universal mood that swells in the photos as the subjects sit idle in their bedrooms, kick around in football cleats and roll in the grass with their faces bare and hair falling out of place. It’s an idleness that only a teenager can know. “Adolescence is a time of metamorphosis, when everything is still possible,” Toïdé says. “It’s also a moment that speaks to memory and to the passage of time, a fragile threshold that never fully leaves us. In those gestures, in that oscillation between shadow and light, I find the same tension that runs through much of my work.”

One medium in which Toïdé communicates that metamorphosis is through the use of nature within the photos. Within the frames are flowering bulbs, butterflies, and rolling hills of grass. “Nature is like a mirror of emotions,” Toïdé explains. “Flowers, grasses, and light become echoes of faces. I love this correspondence between the inner world of teenage girls and fragile, ephemeral landscapes.” A standout shot of the series is one of long-time collaborator Gabrielle, where she stands on the brink of a lake, melancholic in expression. “She looks straight into the lens, with a gentle yet almost wild intensity. It is as if the entire project is concentrated in this suspended moment,” Toïdé explains.

Though it might be tempting to read the work as a personal documentation of French girlhood in an idle town, The Dream Life of Angels speaks to a wider representation of girlhood. Toïdé openly cites cinema as her strongest influence, naming filmmakers Guy Gilles, Mikhael Hers and Mia Hansen-Løve. “What inspires me is their way of working with atmosphere and rhythm, how they capture everyday life with sensitivity, leaving room for silence, time and light,” Toïdé says. She also credits fairytales, evocative interiors, and themes of time, memory and dreams as touchstones of her direction.

When asked about the emotion coursing through the project, Toïdé lands on vertigo, a disorienting, dizzying sensation of standing at a threshold. “The vertigo of growing up, of searching for oneself, of being on the edge of something” are the main themes that the series centres around. This suspension is one she hopes lingers for viewers: “I would like them to feel a sense of floating, like a reminiscence of their own adolescence, with its mixture of hope, loneliness and fragile beauty.” 

The Dream Life of Angels is available here