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…

Jean Luc Tartarin borrows from the history of photography images that he will reproduce in a file which he calls «first» and from which he can experiment with different interventions until obtaining the works he considers to be finished.
When he grabs an old photograph, of argentic nature, once scanned, it becomes like a negative. The raw file, of a particular nature, allows Jean Luc Tartarin to undertake a work of construction of a new image in a kind of digital alchemy. 
After this long work of invention, mixing pleasure and struggle with virtual matter, the final file will be embodied in the materiality of a print on chromogenic paper.
In its work process, the table must not allow to perceive the pixels of which the image is made. Only materials, such as a painted painting, must be visible.
The book is organized around three great iconographic sets: figures, flowers and forests. The latter subject has always been important in the photographic research that the artist has been conducting for more than fifty years.

Cameroon, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Algeria… In this deeply personal work, Jean-Christophe Béchet looks back thirty-five years on his first steps as a young photographer. This long-term work (three years of immersion), which he affectionately calls “my African years”, should have been his first book, but his personal and photographic life decided otherwise.

Few images circulated, the majority having remained in archive boxes all these years. Today, he has reworked his selection, seeking to find a new rhythm. He notes: “As we age, images change their status, some memories fade, others take over, some images take on greater force, others become repetitive and a little ‘cliché’. You have to be able to navigate between a kind of nostalgia (inevitable, since photography is also the art of the past) and a desire to build a contemporary work with photographs that are more than 35 years old”.

Most of the territories featured in African Memories are no longer accessible to French or European visitors. Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, the countries that welcomed him so warmly with his backpack, are now closed places. This book is a vibrant tribute to Africa from a passionate photographer.

In 2003, in the singular setting of the ghost town of Cook, Australia, Laurent Mulot “implanted” the first Middle of Nowhere Contemporary Art Center with the only two inhabitants of this small town. This book is a monograph looking back on more than 20 years of research and encounters around the world, which gradually enabled the author to collaborate with astrophysicists on the notion of the “Middle of Nowhere”.

The work was analyzed by contemporary art historian and critic Paul Ardenne.

This boxed set includes 8 items (books, leporello, posters) for an exceptional experience at the crossroads of contemporary art and archaeology. In 2014, artist Mirela Popa began a project based on the archaeological excavations carried out in Ivry Confluence, notably on the grounds of the former BHV depots, and the preventive excavation campaigns organized on sites dating from the Neolithic period, doomed to disappear due to the necessities of urban expansion. Working in close collaboration with archaeologists, the artist’s work was thus marked by an extensible chronology: from one changing territory to another, from the Neolithic to the contemporary period.