hpgrp Gallery is pleased to announce “Needleworks,” an exhibition by Sophie Delaporte, a French fashion photographer whose images have appeared in publications such as Italian Vogue, Japanese Vogue, and i-D magazine, as well as in advertising campaigns for major clients. Bridging both commercial and high art, her photographs have been exhibited in solo shows in Paris, London, Tokyo, and New York.

Since 2002, when she had her first solo show at Marion Meyer Gallery in Paris, Delaporte has been interested in using fine art photography as a canvas in which to transform and reinvent images. The idea originated in 1999, with a black & white image she took for I-D magazine. Entitled La croix sur l’oeil (the cross over the eye), the photograph depicted a fashion model whose face had been disrupted by a pink cross over her left eye. The image was later used on the invitation for the exhibition at Marion Meyer, and was a starting point for later works.

Originally using her own fashion photographs, which she re-staged and re-took at their original locations to create a mise-en-scène, Delaporte eventually began appropriating images from other sources. In “Needleworks”—first shown at Scream Gallery, in London, in 2008—she sawed apart pornographic images, and then “sutured” them back together with thread and fabric. She then photographed the resulting collages, which she blew up on a monumental scale. At the exhibition at hpgrp Gallery, she will display both the original collages in shadow boxes, and the large-scale images.

Because of her background as a female photographer, Delaporte is attuned to the fragility and vulnerability of a woman being objectified by the camera. By “dressing the invisible” in this series—or giving a layer of protection to the women being depicted—she is not only re-defining their beauty, she is also reflecting the act of seeing. As the philosopher Regis Debray says in his essay, “Vie et mort de l’image,” Delporte is able to “renovate the invisible,” or bring to light what is not seen by the ordinary eye with her thoughtful interventions.