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.

Pop’Africa retraces forty years of travels across the African continent. Myriam Viallefont-Haas has always taken an artistic and committed look at a rich and complex Africa. That of refugees in Somalia, that of the struggle for independence in Namibia, that of the daily life of the Maasai people and the protection of the Maasai Mara in Kenya. This desert Africa, mysterious, traditional, but also modern, vibrant, and independent, which she renews our view of thanks to her eye as a photographer and artist in these painted photographs. Her works are like windows opening onto Africa, where each color and each texture tells of the challenges and beauty of this continent. Her photographs, paintings, and painted photos merge in her creative universe, where she combines the brush with the lens. “When I take a photo, I see a painting,” explains the artist, who loves photography for its speed, and painting for its slowness and meditative nature…

Rio Praia, one of two volumes in a diptych dedicated to Rio (the second being Rio Centro), focuses on these endless stretches of sand, from Copacabana, the most popular, to Prainha, a surfer’s paradise away from the city. The beaches in Rio are a veritable agora where people party and play sports, where everything mixes and mingles in a welcoming atmosphere. They are a true social melting pot where everyone comes together: the bourgeoisie of Leblon, the kids from the favelas, municipal employees, couples sipping coconut juice at the end of a day’s work…Rio lends itself well to Jean-Christophe Béchet’s photographic writing, in which the documentary spirit escapes into a form of poetry.

Rio Centro, one of two volumes in a diptych dedicated to Rio (the second being Rio Praia), is a subjective, intimate portrait of the heart of the city, as lively during the day as it is deserted and dangerous at night, when the offices are closed.
Nearby are the neighborhoods of Santa Teresa, Lapa, Botafogo, Flamengo, Gávea… places where street photography is the perfect tool for capturing a dark and contrasting world. Rio lends itself well to Jean-Christophe Béchet’s photographic writing, in which the documentary spirit escapes into a form of cinematic poetry that leaves reality in suspension…

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.

Nestled in the heart of the French Vexin park, the Villarceaux regional estate invites visitors to stroll and daydream. Listed as a historic monument, this little-known gem is home to a unique collection of buildings dating from the 14th to the 19th centuries, and seventy hectares of exceptionally rich gardens, labeled as a Remarkable Garden.

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.