Julie Joubert – Patria Nostra

Joubert explores the friction between identity and anonymity inside the French Foreign Legion, where a uniform built to erase the self instead becomes a site where masculinity and vulnerability surface. Over three years, French photographer Julie Joubert followed young recruits into the Foreign Legion, a global military institution that offers citizenship, recognition and belonging in exchange for the surrender of name, history and almost everything that came before. Through a closely cropped, tightly focused lens that rarely lets the wider institution into frame, Joubert holds her attention on the individual, mid-transformation: the shaved head, the issued uniform, the muscle built under training, designed to produce a new man from an old one. Patria Nostra turns directly on this construction of masculinity, watching discipline, uniform and body operate as a kind of ambiguous performance for the camera. Documenting this performance, Joubert remains sympathetic throughout, aware that many of these men are fleeing lives marked by poverty, suffering or violence – only to arrive inside an institution forged by France’s own colonial conquests, a history that lies at the root of certain conflicts that some men are hoping to outrun. The self-erasure demanded on entry — name, history and language surrendered in exchange for a new identity — is its own form of violence, one that mirrors and compounds the ruptures many of these men have already lived through, caught inside an institutionalisation of violence that both recruits and remakes them. In testimonies gathered from her subjects, hesitant, multilingual recruits cross out their names mid-sentence, unable to leap across the divide from their old lives into the promise of reinvention the Legion offers them. Patria Nostra resists resolution, sitting instead inside the same uncertainty its subjects are living through, as they assimilate before the camera. Julie Joubert (b. 1989, Paris) is a photographer whose long-term documentary and fine art portrait projects explore identity, youth, and representations of masculinity. A graduate of the École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, her work has been exhibited at the Rencontres d’Arles, the Festival de Photographie et de Mode de Hyères, the Galerie du Jour agnès b., and venues in New York, Rome, Lisbon, and beyond. She has received numerous awards, including the Prix du Public Louis Roederer at the Rencontres d’Arles (2025) and the LensCulture Portrait Awards (2023). Her first monograph, MIDO , was published by Kahl Editions in 2021. She lives and works in Paris. 144pp, 25 colour and 35 duotone plates, 205 × 280 mm, Section-sewn hardcover Edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon Designed by Loose Joints Studio Published by Loose Joints LJ230, November 2026 ISBN 978-1-912719-83-9 Pre-order now and save 10% OFF! Limited to the first 100 copies.