From a young age, she experienced the city’s strong diversity in culture, counting the many mosques and Byzantine Churches, with their Saints dressed in gold and covered with gems nurtured by virgin Icons. She spent her childhood with her grandmother who raised her in the Turkish quarter in Constantinople. Ionesco had been captured and enraptured by Orientalism from an early age. Their surroundings conveyed a surrealistic feeling, evoked by its gothic and fetishistic decor, in which the women appeared like a role in a film. Their faces were covered with striking makeup and their bodies were graced with jewelry and pearls. The black-and-white photographs on display often showed single, half-naked women adorned with lace, fur, and flowers. In 1974, her first exhibition was presented at the Nikon Gallery. She took up photography, when Guillaume Corneille, with whom she was in a relationship at the time, gave her a first camera. It was not until 1951 that she returned to the French capital, where she first started working in the cabaret. Neglected by her parents, she moved to her grandparents in Romania when she was only four years old. The artist was born the daughter of a violinist and a trapeze artist in Paris in 1930.
Throughout her lifetime, Ionesco had made a name for herself with her images of seductive and sensual women, displayed in dark and theatrical settings. To our great dismay, on July 25, 2022, photographer Irina Ionesco passed away at the age of 91 in her hometown of Paris.