This Is Me!

Introduction

For more than fifty years, millions of fans have kept metal culture alive. Yet no photographer had ever set out to create its definitive collective portrait.

Hellfest, Wacken, Motocultor… Behind the riffs, the decibels and the appearances lies one of the freest and most fascinating communities of our time. Over several years, Sandrine Mulas sought out the people who are its soul. She returned with hundreds of portraits of rare intensity, shot on medium-format film, in which every gaze tells a story of freedom, identity and belonging.

Where others document a festival, Sandrine Mulas reveals individuals whose faces and bodies are elevated by her lens, offering their unvarnished truth. Her portraits transcend reportage to join the great tradition of photographic portraiture, providing an unprecedented record of a community that no one had yet portrayed on such a scale or with such insight.

With a foreword by Amélie Nothomb and contributions from psychiatrist Laurent Karila, sociologist Gérôme Guibert, anthropologist Corentin Charbonnier, music programmer Luc Frelon, filmmaker Marc Dufaud, therapist Anne-Laure Buffet, designer Anne-Andréa Brochard and illustrators Førtifem, This is Me! is much more than a photography book: it is the first major exploration of metal culture that brings such sensitivity and artistic vision to its subject. A landmark volume, as essential for metalheads as it is for anyone who loves contemporary photography.

They call them freaks. As if to say strange, different, too much. But I look at them and see stars. I see souls tattooed in gold, hearts burning without shame, forms of beauty they do not teach you about at school. I see whole people, not the parts that make others uncomfortable. Others point a finger at them; I portray them from the heart. I frame their light. I give back what has been taken from them: tenderness, dignity, the right to be seen without being judged. They say metal is violent.

I say it is a refuge of leather and gentleness, a scream that soothes, a family without conditions.

There, you are accepted as you come, with your cracks, your tattoos, your rage, your running mascara and your heart beating too hard. It is a tribe without masks, where difference reigns and outcasts become kings. A cathedral of amplifiers and tenderness, where screams do you good and scars speak to one another without shame. I love these people. The ones no one understands.

The ones people look away from. The ones they call strange, when they are simply alive. I want to show their beauty. No disguises, no corrections. Beautiful in their truth. Beautiful in their brokenness. Beautiful in their rage and gentleness.

A search for the self

This book of portraits of metalheads serves a fundamental purpose: to cast a sensitive, nuanced light on a world that is often caricatured, revealing the rich inner lives of the people who make it what it is. Far more than a simple collection of portraits, the book explores how members of the metal community use their appearance, gestures and codes to express a part of themselves that usually remains private. This is precisely the impulse Serge Tisseron theorised as “extimacy”: the desire to make certain fragments of the self visible, not to put them on display, but to open up an encounter, create a connection and find genuine recognition in another person’s eyes.

Among metalheads, extimacy takes shape through choices of clothing, symbols, attitudes and rituals that, far from serving as masks, reveal what lies within. Each portrait thus bears witness to a process of identity formation: by allowing something deeply personal to surface, the individual affirms a sensibility, a history and a way of relating to the world. The metal aesthetic becomes a language — sometimes rough, often misunderstood, but always charged with personal truth.

By showing these faces and bodies, this book does not seek to “explain” the metal community, still less to reduce it to a single image. Instead, it offers a journey through these individual expressions of extimacy, in which vulnerability, rebellion, creativity and the determination to be oneself against all odds find a voice. By capturing the moment when the inner self becomes visible through outward appearance, the photographic portrait becomes a space of mutual recognition: a place where we discover that, behind appearances, everyone is trying to express their own truth.

Through the extimacy of metalheads, a universal question ultimately emerges: how do we find our place in society by openly revealing what defines us most deeply? While the book challenges the marginalisation of this community, above all it questions the ways in which we present our own inner lives to the world.

Her portraits, shot in 6 × 6 format, are moments of silence and contemplation captured amid noise and fury. With remarkable sensitivity, they explore the search for identity, self-assertion and duality in societies governed by norms, where difference remains taboo and can even be grounds for discrimination. A thread connects all these faces, all these bodies. It reminds us that being ourselves can sometimes be a struggle. A personal one. With ourselves and with others.

Contributors