French photographer Elise Toïdé has released a compelling new zine titled "The Dream Life of Angels" that explores the complex emotional landscape of teenage girls navigating the transformative period of adolescence. The project features intimate portraits of four young women – Gabrielle, Dana, Ari, and Cat – photographed in Paris and its surrounding areas, capturing what Toïdé describes as the "dizzying vertigo" of growing up.
The zine's title emerged from an unexpected connection to cinema. Art director Wataru Komachi suggested the name during the project's early stages, unknowingly referencing the 1998 French film "The Dreamlife of Angels" (La vie rêvée des anges) directed by Erick Zonca. The film tells the story of two young women struggling through precarious lives while maintaining an intimate bond of survival. When Toïdé later revealed that the film had deeply moved her years earlier, she felt what she describes as "an intense emotion" and "silent recognition" of the unexpected connection between Komachi's vision and her own artistic perspective.
The photographer deliberately chose ordinary, unglamorous settings that exist outside the typical romantic imagery associated with Paris. Rather than featuring iconic landmarks or picturesque scenes, Toïdé's lens focuses on childhood bedrooms, grassy parks, and the overlooked margins of the city. "These ordinary places become the setting for metamorphoses," she explains. "Their banality serves as a backdrop for an almost cinematic atmosphere, where intimacy and dreams intertwine."
The subjects themselves embody a similar sense of everyday authenticity. There is no overarching narrative or easily followed storyline; instead, the photographs capture a universal mood as the young women sit idle in their bedrooms, kick around in football cleats, and roll in grass with bare faces and disheveled hair. This portrayal of teenage idleness – a state of being that Toïdé suggests only adolescents can truly understand – forms the emotional core of the work. "Adolescence is a time of metamorphosis, when everything is still possible," she notes. "It's also a moment that speaks to memory and to the passage of time, a fragile threshold that never fully leaves us."
Nature plays a significant symbolic role throughout the series, serving as both setting and metaphor. Flowering bulbs, butterflies, and rolling hills of grass appear throughout the frames, creating visual echoes of the subjects' internal experiences. "Nature is like a mirror of emotions," Toïdé explains. "Flowers, grasses, and light become echoes of faces. I love this correspondence between the inner world of teenage girls and fragile, ephemeral landscapes."
One particularly striking image features Gabrielle, a long-time collaborator of Toïdé's, standing at the edge of a lake with a melancholic expression. She gazes directly into the camera lens with what the photographer describes as "a gentle yet almost wild intensity." For Toïdé, this single frame encapsulates the entire project's essence: "It is as if the entire project is concentrated in this suspended moment."
While the work might initially appear to be a specific documentation of French girlhood in a quiet town, Toïdé's vision extends to a broader, more universal representation of the female adolescent experience. Her artistic influences draw heavily from cinema, particularly the work of directors Guy Gilles, Mikhael Hers, and Mia Hansen-Løve. "What inspires me is their way of working with atmosphere and rhythm, how they capture everyday life with sensitivity, leaving room for silence, time and light," she says. Beyond film, Toïdé cites fairytales, evocative interior spaces, and recurring themes of time, memory, and dreams as fundamental touchstones in her artistic direction.
When asked to identify the central emotion that courses through the project, Toïdé settles on the concept of vertigo – that disorienting, dizzying sensation experienced when standing at the edge of transformation. "The vertigo of growing up, of searching for oneself, of being on the edge of something are the main themes that the series centers around," she explains. This sense of suspension and uncertainty captures the liminal space that adolescents occupy between childhood and adulthood.
The photographer hopes that viewers will connect with this feeling of being caught between worlds. She wants them to experience "a sense of floating, like a reminiscence of their own adolescence, with its mixture of hope, loneliness and fragile beauty." Through her lens, Toïdé has created a visual meditation on one of life's most challenging and transformative periods, offering viewers a chance to revisit their own memories of navigating the complex terrain between youth and maturity. "The Dream Life of Angels" zine is now available for purchase, providing an intimate glimpse into the photographer's sensitive portrayal of contemporary girlhood and the universal experience of growing up.
