Kourtney Roy was born in North Bay, Ontario, into a family of truck drivers and loggers. You can see it in her images: empty highways, rundown motels, dilapidated gas stations. She grew up between the vast forests of British Columbia and the sluggish small towns of northern Ontario. That landscape never left her.
She became a photographer almost by accident. Enrolled at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, she had been planning to become a painter. An elective photography class in her second semester changed everything. She showed up to the admissions interview with no photos in her portfolio — just some bad student paintings. When asked about her plans for the summer, she said she had just joined a bluegrass jam session. Two weeks later, she was accepted. There is something very Roy about that story: the casual defiance, and the triumph through singularity.
After Vancouver came the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, then a year and a half as a photo studio assistant. In 2007, she went independent — which she herself describes, with biting irony, as “the debut of a long, dolorous period of penury and crapulence.” She did not go back to Canada. She stayed. Paris became her base, but it is America — its margins, its forgotten people, its in-between spaces — that remains her true hunting ground.
The self-portrait has been central to her practice from the beginning. She started at university, initially as a pragmatic solution to the questions of representation already troubling art schools: photographing yourself means you are not instrumentalising someone else’s body. But very quickly the approach outgrew that theoretical justification. Staging herself became a way of inhabiting the imaginary worlds she carries inside her. She constructs elaborate characters — women who are too perfect, trapped in their own banality, absent from themselves. She becomes them. Some self-portraits are sensual, others frankly provocative, others oscillate between cheap glamour and something darker, truer. One thinks of Guy Bourdin for the aesthetics of staged desire, of Diane Arbus for the way surface normality conceals a deep strangeness, of Martin Parr for the oversaturated colours.
She works exclusively in colour. It is an absolute principle: “I have zero interest in making black and white images.” In her photographs, oranges burn, pinks scream, and the blue of the American sky has that particular quality that turns any shabby backdrop into a film set. Because cinema is everywhere in her work — and I see a great deal of David Lynch in it. She watches one to three films a day, taking screenshots compulsively. Ken Losey, Andrea Arnold, Werner Herzog, Douglas Sirk and the melodramas of the 1950s: filmmakers who share the ability to find drama in the most ordinary everyday life. William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld for photography — she has absorbed all of it and made something entirely her own.
The spaces that draw her are the ones the rest of the world prefers to ignore: mobile home parks, forgotten rest stops, rundown hotels on highways to nowhere. These liminal spaces where nobody lingers. She sees in them both an echo of the landscapes of her childhood and something universally human — that generic architecture, banal and unsettling at once, which says something true about our modern lives.
Represented by Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, shown at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2025, she is currently working on her debut feature film, Krypto, a psychological thriller. Kourtney Roy readily defines herself as “the patron saint of the depraved and downtrodden.” That phrase says it all: the irony, the tenderness, and the way she looks at the margins of the world with an attention that many photographers deny them.
Her exhibition at the Cité de l’économie (Paris 17th) runs until September 20th, and is free every weekend of the summer. Not to be missed.
The only weakness of this exhibition is that it is too small and over too quickly. I would have loved to see such cool work take up much more space in such a large and beautiful venue.
Grégory Herpe
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