Finalists – Prix Picto de la Mode 2025 : Carla Rossi

Carla Rossi is a French-Italian artist working between Paris and Milan. Trained at Brera and ECAL, she explores how the digital reshapes identity and imagination, blending photography with image manipulation. In Water Portraits, she reinvents the classic portrait: a submerged face becomes a shifting surface, altered by light and water. Oscillating between figuration and abstraction, the series questions how we see — and how we’re seen — in the age of the fluid image.

Biography

Ella Bats is a French photographer artist based in Paris. She graduated in art and graphic design from ENSAAMA and later attended the Gobelins School of Image for photography until 2017. What is evident in her work is the proximity between painting and material that she translates through art, fashion, and portraiture. Ella Bats explores the medium of digital photography, utilizing the capabilities of retouching through layering, multiplication, and fusion of different layers. She questions the connections between an individual’s inner world and how it can be represented. She establishes an intimate dialogue with her subjects, allowing their humanity to appear uniquely. Photography has always been, for her, both a
means of representing a world and an attempt to understand others.

Water Portraits

Water Portraits is a visual study on the interaction between light, water and a subject. Developed through repeated underwater sessions with the same model, the series isolates the face as a site of transformation, where shape, light, and liquid converge. Though the model remains constant, her appearance shifts with every frame, altered not by gesture but by the mechanics of refraction and flow. Water operates not as a backdrop but as an active optical tool: an unstable lens that bends light and fractures form. Each session becomes a procedural experiment: the subject is immersed, the camera waits, and it is the liquid itself, its pressure, its turbulence, its temperature, that determines an always different visual outcome. The resulting images are close-up studies that oscillate between figuration and abstraction. Printed at a 1:1 scale and sequenced chromatically from red to blue, the series references the visible light spectrum, transforming the face into a fluid, shifting surface that functions less as a portrait and more as a diagram of perception under changing conditions.