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Pierre Klein: Getting to women's heart through their bags
A snapshot of content of a handbag of a 29-year-old female public relation officer
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A snapshot of content of a handbag of a 29-year-old female public relation officer.
Pierre Klein's curiosity was initially about the contents of a Parisienne, female native or resident of Paris, handbag but his experience opened up much more than that.
'Mon sac por moi c'est un petit moi [My bag is a mini me],' 29-year-old media relation officer Anne-Sophie, 29, told Klein during one of his interviews.
Klein's Elles Vident Leur Sac (They Empty Their Bag) is an investigation and exhibition project that speaks to its audience in three languages: pictures, movie and text.
For the exhibition, held at Marsio Art Gallery, Menteng, Central Jakarta, from May 26 through June 9, Klein presented pictures of items found in women's bags accompanied by a hand-written explanation and a movie in which they explain the items.
In the project, Klein explored Parisian handbags as the intimate accessory of day-to-day life. He focused on the handbag, its contents and the women's interaction with their bags. Through the bags, Klein aimed to reveal their personalities.
Klein is Parisian himself, born of an American photographer father William Klein and Belgian painter mother Jeanne.
He said that a woman's handbag for many French men was an object of mystery.
'Peering into a handbag is a taboo; you can't even look inside your mother's handbag. This curiosity started small and grew throughout the years.
'Men also carry items but only what they can fit inside their pockets. You wonder what women [have in their bags],' Klein told The Jakarta Post on the exhibition's opening day.
In 2009, he decided to quench his curiosity by asking unprepared women of unspecified ages and background to empty their bag and tell him about the contents.
Initially, Klein worried his request would not be welcomed so he asked a female assistant to ask her friends.
'I disguised the recorded interview as a sociological project where they would be interviewed and photographed and recorded. Once they agreed, I would sit them in front of the camera and asked 'I would like you to empty your bag'.
'To my surprise, none of them said 'No'. They referred me to their friends and in one-and-a-half years I had interviewed a total of 50 women,' Klein said.
The filmed interviews would always begin with slight confusion and hesitation, but each woman would voluntarily empty their bag and describe its contents.
During the one-on-one interviews, Klein kept his distance and only intervened to ask questions or encourage the women to go further in their commentaries.
'It turned out to be an amazing experience for me. From a talk about daily items, they would go on speaking what's in their mind, their life and their choices.
'Some of them could talk continuously for three hours; I ended up with 150 hours of footage,' Klein said.
Klein also explained that 'to empty one's bag' was also a French idiom meaning 'to say what you have in your heart'.
The interviews are often similar to a session with a psychiatrist and turned into confession, showing the deep evocative power of everyday objects.
'What they have in their bag is a reflection of who they are.
'They started by emptying their bag but ended up talking about their life,' he said.
During the project, Klein made the observation that Parisienne typically only use 20 percent of the items they have in their bag.
'For example, one woman had lots of make-up but she did not wear much make-up herself. She brought them just in case an unplanned occasion calls,' Klein said.
Upon the request of Institut Français d'Indonésie (IFI), Klein also interviewed six Jakartans during his one week stay in late May. The snapshots of the Jakartans' handbags were also included in the exhibition.
'Contrary to the Parisienne, Jakartans use 80 percent of the items they bring, with the rest prepared just in case,' he said.
What do you take from this difference?
'A simple-minded deduction says that Jakarta women live more in the reality. But this is a big maybe,' he said with a laugh.
' Photos by Andreas d. Arditya
