The photographic vocabulary of the “bad girl” rebellion.

Considered “deviant”, “vicious”, “ineducable” or ‘lost’, thousands of young girls were placed by court order in so-called “preservation schools”, public prison institutions for minors founded at the end of the 19th century, whose doors were not closed until 1951.
Drawing on the archives of these terrible places of confinement, artist Agnès Geoffray has created indecisive images with extraordinary emancipatory power, depicting the strategies of surveillance and body straightening, as well as the girls’ gestures of revolt, dissidence and solidarity. Punctuated by texts by art historian Vanessa Desclaux that combine this artistic approach with other narratives of struggle, this book restores voice and body to the “bad girls”, rehabilitating them as political subjects of their history – which is also ours.