Located in the heart of the University City of Madrid, the Casa de Velázquez, a French institution inaugurated in 1928, was created to host artists and researchers in residence.

During his residency at the Casa de Velázquez between 1993 and 1994, photographer Max Armengaud focused his gaze and his lens on the place and its inhabitants.
Thirty years later, between 2023 and 2024, he returned for a new series of photographs, following the same protocol. The portrait of the institution is a portrait of those who live and work there. Everyone is represented: the staff, the management, the residents, and the scholarship recipients… The photographer captures the intimate connections that are forged between the space and those who inhabit it.
To fully capture the spirit of the place, the artist meticulously explored the various spaces of the Casa: interiors and exteriors, public and private, from the most visible to the most secluded. Each subject is given equal weight. A strong sense of unity emerges, affirming the institution’s enduring presence. The portraits, exclusively in black and white, alternate with photographs of the premises, the most recent of which are in color, a medium that has only appeared in Max’s work for about fifteen years.

Le Soleil même la nuit explores the nature and forms of damaged or broken parental bonds through the testimonies of twenty-six parents from various socio-cultural and professional backgrounds, some of whom have not communicated with their children for months or even years. Photographer Marco Barbon depicts this family bond beyond the child’s absence, in a representation that parents have of themselves. Intimate texts written by mothers and fathers interact with the images through triptychs on fold-out pages, which modestly reveal this emotional space where emptiness remains, where past tenderness is the most precious of archives. This book does not limit itself to showing the suffering endured by parents; it also highlights the unconditional love that these mothers and fathers have for their children. Parental love is there despite everything, and it cannot be erased: it is a sun that shines with all its warmth even on the darkest night.

These photographs bear witness to the traces of a process of resilience, continuing beyond the images produced and perhaps also thanks to them. The book will be accompanied by texts by specialists (Irène Théry, Bruno Humbeeck, and Marie-France Hirigoyen) in the introduction and conclusion, as well as a text by Marco Barbon.
This photographic work is part of a broader project that will include audio documentaries, videos, short films, and transmedia exhibitions beginning in the fall of 2025 and continuing throughout 2026.

“Why do people judge us when they know nothing about us ?”

For eighteen months, Françoise Evenou immersed herself in the heart of the Bois de Boulogne, meeting trans women who prostitute themselves to survive. Intrigued by these women, dressed like beauty queens, sitting in front of their vans or standing on the pavements, Françoise Evenou decided to meet them. Coming from South America, they left everything behind for a better life, to live freely in the country of Human Rights. Yet five, ten, twenty years later, we find them in their New World… the Bois de Boulogne. More than thirty of these women agreed to speak out and be photographed. Ignored, insulted, despised, often assaulted, they found the strength to reveal themselves, to finally tell the world their truth and to bear witness to their dignity.

Through a series of poignant photographs and candid interviews, Françoise Evenou has chosen to tackle this sensitive subject by celebrating these women without hiding anything about their reality or the vioùlence of the world in which they live.

The Nature of Balances is a story built around a photographic investigation that Sylvain Gouraud conducted over a decade in agricultural circles.
It follows the thread that connects our ways of seeing to our ways of working the land, playing on the analogy between photographing and land grabbing. It attempts to connect the worlds of culture and agriculture.

The book is divided into three chapters entitled:
Seeing, Knowing, and Having.
Seeing: This first chapter describes our ways of seeing and the influence of aesthetics on agricultural practices.
Knowing: This second chapter immerses us in the need for farmers to make choices and in the way their knowledge is constructed, between scientific belief and esoteric pragmatism.
Having: This final chapter explores the consequences of a capitalist understanding of life through our relationship with agricultural machinery, land grabbing, and seed patenting.

The Nature of Balances presents a contemporary representation of the agricultural world, from its various practices to the way it shapes the land. It explores both the industrial and biodynamic aspects.

From 2019 to 2024, Cédric Calandraud returned to the lands of his childhood and adolescence to photograph the young people who live in the villages of eastern and northern Charente. Through an immersive investigation, he documented this period, at the end of adolescence, when some leave to study in the cities without knowing if they will ever return and when others stay to train in the region hoping to quickly integrate into working life. These young people are called Anthony, Océane, Teddy, and are between 15 and 25 years old. The photographer met them in schools, community centers, at their workplace or during their free time when they find themselves “at each other’s houses”, at the motocross track or on the banks of the river. For him, working with them was an opportunity to rediscover this territory he left at the age of 18, but also its history and origins, to connect them to the present and to his practice. Photograph after photograph, he reconnected with this place that he still calls home.

This book is accompanied by a text retracing these five years of investigation, an interview with sociologists Yaëlle Amsellem-Mainguy and Benoît Coquard and a political perspective of this work against the invisibility of rural youth by Félix Assouly and Salomé Berlioux.

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.