POUR TRANSFORMER VOTRE VIE PASSEZ UNE PETITE ANNONCE

Born in a tunnel on the outskirts of Zurich, this project delves into the subterranean zones of desire to reveal their transformative power.

Between 2022 and 2025, Vladislav Semenov responded to hundreds of erotic personal ads published across Switzerland. From these correspondences emerged encounters where strangers staged their most intimate imaginings, venturing along the fragile line between impulse and social constraint.

At the crossroads of documentary and personal myth, the series unfolds as a double theatre: that of the models, re-enacting their desires, and that of the photographer, confronting his own inner imagery. Guided by a psychoanalytic approach, Semenov’s gaze – poetic and humanistic – captures the individual in a moment of ultimate intimacy, probing that inner stage each of us constructs to contain our drives.

Beyond eroticism, the project explores a fundamental need: to be seen and recognized, in order to attain a form of inner peace. Here, Eros becomes the engine of an ascent, a force of transcendence linking desire to consciousness.

The photographs also engage in dialogue with archival materials from the Maurice Chalumeau Centre for the Study of Sexualities and the Grisélidis Réal Centre (Aspasie Association, Geneva), inscribing this work within the living memory of Switzerland’s erotic imagination.

2025
Edited by FEBBR

Design by Olivia Hespel-Obregon
Preface by Vladislav Semenov

300 copies
ISBN 978-2-9578306-9-5