La couleur vient après of Anne-Lise Broyer revisits the different series that the artist has developed over nearly thirty years. It is the place for her to propose a new reading of images that the reader has been able to discover in the previous and numerous works she has published. Anne-Lise Broyer plays, in a way, a new interpretation of her work in an original sequence-montage that she always masters in all the conceptions of her books. This collection is an opportunity to build a new photographic narrative – and to discover many unpublished ones – with literary accents that are always found in his work, inspired by Duras, Flaubert, Rimbaud…

Moreover, as usual, she likes to invite writers to collaborate in her books. The poet Emmanuel Laugier, whose sensitivity to images runs through his work from his first book L’oeil bande, composed about ten original poems, written specifically to resonate with the photographic flow established by Anne-Lise Broyer. For her part, the art critic Sally Bonn proposes at the end of the book a more analytical text on the relationship to writing in the artist’s work.

This book is co-edited with the Jeu de Paume on the occasion of the Niépce – Gens d’images prize, which Anne-Lise Broyer was awarded in 2024.

Patrick Weidmann, deliver in Abstraction faite another facet of his multiple talents: writing. Between the essay and the aphoristic form, the author explores by touches our contemporary world in a style always lively and sharp, taking the reader sometimes to the approaches of nonsense.

In a few shortcuts, here is what constitutes the world of writing of Patrick Weidmann: the society of tourism, the world after God, the great masterpieces of past centuries, photography, objects and beings of fantasies, Elena Ceausescu, the dream, the real, the war, the cocktails, the stars, money, astrophysics, style, post-dandyism… all this and more, dotted with memories and reflections, on what makes a creator’s life today.

The essay is covered with photographic works by Patrick Weidmann, autonomous in relation to the narrative and far from illustration, just coming to slightly open up other dimensions.

Métamorphose is a work that was composed with four hands. The first part develops a photographic narrative that the Quebec artist Serge Clément sets up from urban dembulations where he captures in his street photos, situations blurred by the play of reflection or framing that he masters like no other photographer. The gaze sometimes struggles to recognize the elements of the image and reality plays with the metamorphosis of the title.
The head-down bound book turns to allow the reader to enter another narrative, this one textual, composed of short prose poems written by the Montreal writer Alexis Desgagnés whose texts were inspired by the photographs of Serge Clément. Drawings in Indian ink by Alexis Desgagnées bring another dimension to the work.
For the two authors, the animal presence comes out in their photographs, texts or drawings, thus conversing with Ovid to replay a contemporary mythology.

Raphaëlle Peria uses photography as a medium to carry out work in the field of drawing. For some years, she has been developing a scratching technique which she uses to make new forms appear and reveal the elements of photography that are most evocative of the subject she is approaching. Landscapes, natural elements and ecosystems are at the heart of her artistic approach and are starting points for her travels during which she takes her shots. By selecting fragments of the image, those kept as they are, she creates changes in scale and plays with different textures, a photographic materiality that has become her own style, textures produced by her technique refined over time. These games of metamorphoses bring forth new worlds. His works here make up an environment that is both fragile and fascinating.

We have moved from a supply-driven economy to a demand-driven economy. The new world economy is not only defined by the sovereignty of a financial logic, it is inseparable from the weight that consumers represent. Consumption now works as a continuous and unceasing flow. Billboards installed in the landscape already belong to the past, to an analog era. Their materiality is replaced by electronic advertising devices that are now installed in the virtual fields of the Internet.

The work of the Spanish photographer Eduardo Nave has been to document these skeletons from a glorious past and make an inventory. These panels have become fallen totems that disintegrate, year after year, contaminating the environment and the visual landscape. It reveals an archeology of a consumer society from another century.

« Espacio disponible is the anti-Times Square: to the saturation of the urban space by the shining neon and LED signs follows the no man’s land of arid, depopulated, almost desert, only surmounted by fleshy structures in search of an unlikely buyer. The desolation after the brilliant, the emptiness after the excess, the boredom after the euphoria of advertising animation. This is the time of the disaffection of a great communication vector born at the beginning of industrial modernity. » Gilles Lipovetsky

We know very little about the life of Eugene Atget. Yannick Le Marec analysed the photographer’s production (thousands of photographs) taken between 1890 and 1920, as well as all his archives left to the BNF after his death (in particular press clippings and political newspapers). It is therefore a new approach that tells us a little more about this photographer, including his strong political commitments close to the anarchist circles of the time. The author focused on his photographic work around the Zone, this geographical era between the fortifications and the suburbs, a 300-meter wide ring that surrounds Paris beyond the abandoned Thiers fortifications. This is the area where ragmen gather to live and sort their loot. The parallel between the work of the current Greater Paris, the areas of concentration of migrants or drug addicts is also discussed.

Consisting of seventy black and white photographs, the series grouped under the title L’État des choses, contains both snapshots and studio shots. This photographic set was assembled to translate a desire to enter the thickness of the world, in its materiality, through the signs and phenomena it produces. Conceived in the form of sequences, the book operates by blocks of intensities through which not only a point of view is drawn, but also a variation of perspectives where only relations prevail. By considering the studio as a laboratory and the photographic snapshots as a capture, the resulting experimentation gives rise, over the course of the book, to a certain form of strangeness in beings and things. This book is accompanied by a short text by Patrice Blouin.

The philosopher Gilles Tiberghien is known for his work on landscape and particularly for his research around Land Art, his writings and meetings with the greatest artists who have contributed to the diffusion in France of this important artistic movement born in the United States in the twentieth century. But for a long time, less known by his public, Gilles Tiberghien is interested in photography and writes regularly about contemporary photographers. Paysmages thus brings together a set of texts written over nearly twenty years. The selection of photographers that the author has decided to propose here highlights his reflections on the notion of landscape: “The question here is not how we picture landscapes, through photography, but rather how it crystallizes into these images something that we end up calling landscape.”

Essays on the works of Aurore Bagarry, Thibaut Cuisset, Suzanne Doppelt, Hamish Fulton, Mario Giacomelli, Lucie Jean, Josef Koudelka, Richard Long, Alex MacLean, Manuela Marques, Bernard Plossu, Claire Renier, Bertrand Stofleth and Bill Viola.

Duographie retraces ten years of the creation of the artist duo Pétrel I Roumagnac (duo), formed by Aurélie Pétrel and Vincent Roumagnac. At the crossroads of visual arts and theatre, their work explores the dialogue between photography and staging through installations with reactivation protocols and photostage pieces. Since 2013, they have been designing creations that evolve in accordance with their exhibition environment, questioning the conventions of the visibility of works, both in space and time. Each of the pieces presented by the duo is constantly moving in its exhibition space, evolving between latency time, reserve space and redistribution in space, according to successive rearrangements of photographic objects and other materials that make up them. The result is hybrid installations, a contemporary object theatre with blurred temporalities, a mixture of still images, body traces and performative sculpture in perpetual movement. The book takes the position of focusing visually on de rêves, d’Astérion, and de l’Ekumen, the trilogy of photoscenic pieces created by the duo between 2016 and 2023, each offering an immersive dive into their abundant floating universe. The duophonic play in nine scenes reproduces, in a theatre format, interviews between the two protagonists, which, together with friends passing through the course of their discussion, take place throughout the work played in and for the book, and illuminating, at the heart of the words inside, the ten years of this unique work in duo.

Aurélie Pétrel’s photographic practice questions the status of the image, its use and the mechanisms of its production. Anchored in the long term, her research aims to bring shooting back to the center of multisensory reflection using spatial devices. Aurélie Pétrel poses the question of the mutation-mutability of an image, its potential for fractalization, not only in itself but also in what it can cause as a disturbance in her experience of pluriperception. For her, a shot generates a multitude of shots from different points of view. Time and space are constantly superimposed, while they continue to disintegrate. The moving image is redistributed and its subsequent metamorphoses thus outweigh its consensual absorption, its one and definitive perception, its decisive moment and position. Implementing the formal tools and intellectual processes of both artists and researchers, Pétrel combines a visual and conceptual approach in a programmatic series of situations, where the exhibition format replays each time differently, the interpretative dimension of any score, any photograph in latency, any form waiting for metamorphosis. Her work is part of the collection of the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne (CH); of the Centre National d’Art Moderne (MNAM)–Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP), of the FRAC Normandie Rouen and of the FRAC Occitanie Montpellier…