If you'd been following her work, you knew what to expect. For the rest of us. Well, we just found out what she is really all about. The Paris-based photographer has spent the past few years building a portfolio that treats sports photography like cinema. Paris 2024, adidas, Nike and Kappa campaigns, UEFA Euro coverage. One common thread. Images that combine elegance with a poetic perspective, the kind that reveal the intensity of performance. She plays with angles and movement in ways that turn athletic moments into something closer to art.
Milan Cortina gave her a new canvas and she used all of it. What she brought back was a set of images that have been moving through timelines for the past week, and they don't look like Olympic photography. More, stills from a James Bond movie that doesn't exist yet.
The palette is almost entirely blue. Deep, moody, cinematic blue with heavy grain that sits somewhere between film stock and digital pushed to its limits. It's giving Die Another Day. The ice palace sequence. That specific kind of glossy, stylised winter that only exists in high-budget action films.
What makes Pernet's approach work is the commitment to it. This isn't one or two experimental shots mixed into a traditional set. The entire series holds the same visual language. Overhead angles, monochromatic blues, athletes isolated against expanses of textured ice and snow. It's a choice, and it's consistent, which is what separates a strong idea from a strong body of work.
Most photographers at that scale play it safer, stick closer to what's expected, build the portfolio first and take ‘risks’ later. Pernet walked in and shot like someone who'd already earned the right to ignore the rulebook.
The work has been picking up traction across photography circles and beyond over the past few days, and rightly so, the kind of organic attention that happens when something looks different enough to stop the scroll. We know a thing or two about that.
Worth crediting by name when the work inevitably gets reposted without it.
A true shot of the good stuff.
Shot of the good stuff.
