How I Photographed Jennifer Hermoso for France Football

Since April, I’ve been working extensively on editorial assignments for L’Équipe and France Football, continuing a collaboration that had already started during 2024.

The work has gradually become more frequent, more direct, and more demanding. Which is exactly how editorial photography should feel.

The assignment in Monterrey was centered around Jennifer Hermoso.

Photographing public figures today means dealing with multiple layers simultaneously. There is the person, of course, but also the projection surrounding that person: media exposure, symbolic weight, public interpretation, narrative construction. Contemporary portraiture exists somewhere inside that tension.

What interested me was avoiding emphasis.

Too much editorial portrait photography today feels overconstructed, visually anxious, desperate to communicate importance through aesthetics alone. Excessive lighting, excessive control, excessive explanation.

I wanted the opposite.

The session was photographed entirely with flash, but not in the way editorial flash is often expected to function. Not to amplify spectacle or build visual aggression. Quite the contrary. I used it almost against its traditional purpose, trying to neutralize the sense of construction rather than reinforce it.

A quieter image interested me more.

Something restrained enough to leave space for ambiguity, silence, and presence. An image able to exist inside an international editorial framework without becoming consumed by its mechanisms.

That approach also involved a certain degree of risk. Because contemporary editorial systems often reward clarity, impact, and immediate visual readability. Slowing things down visually can feel almost counterintuitive today.

But I increasingly believe portraiture becomes more interesting precisely when it stops trying so hard to convince.

A few days after the assignment, the portrait was selected as the cover for France Football.

And perhaps this is one of the most fascinating contradictions within editorial photography: the more you try to remove noise from an image, the more public the image itself can eventually become.

You can find the article on L’Equipe website: click here