The controversial photographer Irina Ionesco died on Monday July 25, 2022. at the age of 91, at the Rothschild Hospital in Paris. It was his daughter, director Eva Ionesco, who announced it by telephone to the media. “I would like people to remember that my mother was also a great photographer, that she always worked in an inventive and artisanal way, that she mainly photographed female models, women she met in the street and who were not models, she explains, as reported by the newspaper Release. Often, these women didn’t like each other, felt bad about themselves, and they were happy to be looked at and transfigured by my mother.”
Their relationship, however, was not good. Artistic icon of the 1970s, Irina Ionesco is mainly known for having photographed her daughter in a very suggestive way, sometimes naked, within impressive paintings immortalized in black and white. In 2012, the artist was sentenced to pay 10,000 euros damages for violation of the image and privacy rights of his daughter Eva. She had taken her mother to court against the child pornography shots taken when she was 4 to 12 years old.
Irina Ionesco had lived a complicated childhood. Born of an incestuous relationship in 1930, raised in a Romanian circus, she was a contortionist and snake charmer, before embarking on photography at the age of 34. The painter Guillaume Corneille, his partner at the time, had provoked a passion by offering him a reflex camera. The story of the mother-daughter duo, the general public knows it in particular thanks to the movie release My Little Princess in 2011, in which Irina Ionesco was played by Isabelle Huppert, and Eva Ionesco by Anamaria Vartolomei. At the head of the project, Eva Ionesco released a sequel in 2019, A golden youth, and plans to turn these biographical and fictional accounts into a trilogy. You have to believe that over time, the filmmaker has managed to find a certain inner peace. “Irina Ionesco my mother died last nightshe noted modestly on social networks. Rest in peace…“