With her photo series Journal implicite (2008–2012), Lydia Flem presents a veritable reinvention of portrait photography. She uses various different objects to represent her personal history: for instance the illness that she overcame, the history of her parents, who survived the Nazi death camps, and material from 20th-century history in a wider sense. She shows all this in an artistic, mischievous, kaleidoscope-like play of epochs and European settings entirely in the sense of Walter Benjamin.
Lydia Flem is a photographer, psychoanalyst, and writer who has been awarded several prizes; she is a member of the prestigious Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique. In the images of her Journal implicite, she invents an intimate photography (photographie de chambre) akin to chamber music in the field of music.
In 2015, her works were exhibited at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris, which is headed by Jean-Luc Monterosso.