The influential historical painter Paul Delaroche, on reviewing some daguerreotypes, made his much-quoted remark that “from today, painting is dead.” Charles Baudelaire, the poet and critic, was equally agitated by the development of photography and referred to it as merely a product of industry.

Over 160 years later, photographer, Maud Sulter has produced Les Bijoux I-IX, a series of confrontational and sensuous self-portraits that acknowledge the important role Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s black mistress, played in his creative and personal life.

The key function of Les Bijoux is to remind the viewer of how critically close African and European cultures have been throughout history, and that the complexities of these encounters cannot be reduced to simplistic understandings of white encounters with ‘the other’. In many respects, Baudelaire was dependent on Duval, but history written from a Eurocentric perspective denies the nature of this relationship. Duval is therefore reduced to the margins and literally erased.

Sulter’s Les Bijoux is named after one of Baudelaire’s most celebrated poems. These self-portraits function as a reassertion of the presence and power of Jeanne Duval, the black mistress who financially supported and inspired some of his most important works. This re-presentation of Duval is an essential form of cultural excavation, bringing Duval back from oblivion and repositioning her. Sulter’s Les Bijoux literally reframes Duval as an independent and forceful influence on one of France’s greatest poets.

Gustave Courbet’s celebrated painting, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Determining a Phase of Seven Years of My Artistic Life (1855) hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. This painting reveals on close scrutiny the faint trace of Duval’s presence next to the seated figure of Baudelaire. Duval’s erasure from Courbet’s work occurred apparently at the direct request of Baudelaire who, after falling out with Duval, demanded that Courbet remove her from this major new painting. Courbet, aware of Baudelaire’s influence as an art critic, duly obliged.

The question of Duval’s erasure is a major concern for Sulter as it marks the intensity of the relationship between Africa and Europe and is symptomatic of the relationship between the two continents. Les Bijoux’s sense of redress allows the historically rendered, culturally absent black woman to have a voice. Through this form of photographic production, the viewer is allowed access to a new perspective that shifts the imbalance in relation to how black women have historically been portrayed and heard.

In the guise of Duval, Sulter deliberately emanates an alluring sense of confidence, and within each photograph, in the series, there is a strong undercurrent of sexual power. This is intensified by the possibility of both violence and rejection as Sulter, as Duval, turns away from the camera or tugs at the jewels on her neck thus breaking with the conventions of desire.

Collectively the images undress the past and expose the condition of one who has been rendered invisible.