beaux livres : photo, architecture, art

Gestes et rituels de la chambre noire

Michel Campeau

Michel Campeau is one of those photographers who, in addition to creating their own images, have always been passionate about so-called “vernacular” photography, whether anonymous or family-based. He belongs to a generation of photographers that includes Martin Parr, Erik Kessel, Joachim Schmidt, and others, who, through their focus on these neglected images, have created a genre in their own right... For many years, Michel Campeau has been scouring the vastness of globalized image production for amateur and professional photographic prints to feed the various collections he has established.
Thus, darkrooms, which could be considered a kind of original cave of photography, have always been one of his most important collectibles, certainly because they help to reflect his own image, the self-portrait of a creator whose gaze was forged by the silver-based photography that appeared in the darkness of the darkroom, full of magic and substance, which the transition to digital photography has driven away.
From the hundreds of images he has collected, Michel Campeau has created a veritable encyclopedia in Gestes et rituels de la chambre noire (Gestures and Rituals of the Darkroom), spanning more than a century of photography, organized by theme, deconstructing the components of the darkroom: the enlarger, the timers, the lamps, the retouching, the traveling photographers...
The book masterfully plays with a montage of images and is interspersed with texts by the artist.

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The Donkey that became a Zebra: Darkroom stories

Michel Campeau / Joan Fontcuberta

In 2005, Michel Campeau, sensitive to the digital shift, began photographing darkrooms, the laboratories that form the foundation of analog photography, which is rapidly disappearing. At the same time, he collected vernacular photography and continued his creative work through the photography of others, building up collections of anonymous photographs or archives that he found on the Internet or during his travels.

In this book, he creates a kind of temporal montage from these documents, many of which are now impossible to find. He mixes his own photographs with those he appropriates, constructing a history of silver-based photography while weaving his own photographic autobiography.

Joan Fontcuberta analyzes Michel Campeau's work in his text.

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Rudolph Edse

Michel Campeau / Hélène Samson

When Michel Campeau discovered several self-portraits on eBay depicting an individual with all the attributes of a photographer, he knew nothing about Rudolph Edse. Fascinated by the images of happiness and the American dream that this amateur photographer had composed with his entire family, Campeau assembled a large collection of images by the former German engineer who emigrated to the United States in the 1950s.

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