Florès. A woman dressed in black with long, fiery hair. Florès. A gypsy with a witch-like aura, a great flamenco dancer, an actress, and formerly a performer at the Alcazar in Paris. This photographic work speaks of friendship and old age. It is the portrait of a friendship but also the portrait of an 89-year-old woman by a 31-year-old woman—an artist portrayed at the very moment I am building my own artistic life. A series of photographs unfolding behind closed doors: where she lives. An apartment that looks like a caravan drowned in objects. A strange place, somewhere between a cabinet of curiosities and fictional projections. The images document this place, retrace her past, and reveal our mutual affection. When I bring my camera, Florès dresses elegantly and steps into a cyclical game because she knows these images are dedicated to her. The duration of this series—both documentary and fictional—is a reflection in progress on who I am when I photograph. As an artist, I engage in a reflexive process on what ties me to the real, approaching Florès through everything I carry in terms of dreams, fantasies, imagination, and the unconscious: this too is sharpened by the portrait, in its rigor of document and mise-en-scène. As age- and gender-related discrimination intensifies, I ask myself: What kind of society do we want to live in? How do we experience the rarity of a friendship between two women separated by such a significant age gap? How does affection travel through the skin, in contact with a woman who is no longer accustomed to being touched? Everyone mistakes Florès for my grandmother. She has no children. I don’t want any either. This series locates the encounter between my life and that of Florès, as I project my own future onto the situation of my elder. Imagining a possible future means creating interpersonal bonds with our elders. It also means acknowledging that a form of dispossession shapes old age. It means giving them the material and emotional means to project themselves forward. Florès and I experience friendship as a generous form of life, a refuge zone, a place of constant self-reinvention. Through this work, I reflect on how our society treats older people, while celebrating friendship as a space of emancipation and a source of deep joy. Claire Legrand Loyola