In the heart of Parisian cabaret, Russian photographer Daria Troitskaia captures the waiting before desire, where the body prepares to become vision.

There are moments when light becomes a secret language. In Daria Troitskaia’s analogue photographs, taken between 2024 and 2025 behind the scenes at the Crazy Horse in Paris, that light bends in favour of the female body, caressing and sculpting every curve. The famous cabaret, a symbol of the body as spectacle, becomes here a place of contemplation, where the image ceases to seduce and begins to breathe.

The lens looks where the eyes of the audience cannot see. Troitskaia gives us an unprecedented view of the dressing rooms, the waiting and the gestures repeated with ritual precision. Her photographs portray naked bodies immersed in liquid shadows, reflected in mirrors illuminated by flickering light bulbs. Black and white, with its imperfect grain, freezes time and transforms every shot into a dream. It does not seek seduction, but rather the calm tension that precedes movement. The dancers appear as priestesses of a contemporary ritual, aware that beauty is not just an act, but a construction. In one of the images, a dancer stretches out in a circular beam of light, as if trapped in a private orbit. In another, a body is crossed by strips of light that break it down, as in an avant-garde optical experiment. Here we see echoes of Man Ray, but also the hypnotic coldness of Guy Bourdin or the concentrated melancholy of Nan Goldin’s backstage.

Behind the stage lights, the artist finds a fragile form of truth, made of fogged mirrors and smudged make-up. The camera becomes a subtle witness, more interested in the vibration of the skin than in the perfection of the pose.

With this series, Troitskaia brings cabaret back to its most human essence. The Parisian Crazy Horse is not a place of spectacularised desire, but one where the body becomes both language and vulnerability. In a time obsessed with surface, her analogue gaze seems to remind us that the most powerful reality happens offstage, where the lights go out and the body begins to tell its own story.