beaux livres : photo, architecture, art

Jeff Wall

Philippe Bazin

With Jeff Wall, Refonder la modernité (refounding modernity), Philippe Bazin gives us his artist's point of view on the work of a world-renowned photographer. Constantly inviting surrealism in banality, Jeff Wall has become master of the familiar strangeness. Philippe Bazin offers us with a panorama of Wall’s work, from his very first pieces in the late 1970s until the dawn of the 2000s. By doing so, he sheds light on some thirty photographs, reproduced in large format, by comparing them with the Baudelairian ideal of the "painter of modern life" which has permeated the Canadian artist's practice and thinking from the outset. This book has the advantage of being a fluid, intellectual and sensitive dialogue between two photographers on the lookout for the "fantastic real extracted from life" that Baudelaire had glimpsed.

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UN ARCHIPEL DES SOLIDARITÉS

Philippe Bazin / Christiane Vollaire

“To those who continue to be battered by the political storms threatening our archipelagos. To those who have the collective strength to weather these storms.”

This book is the result of fieldwork carried out in Greece between July 2017 and January 2020 by philosopher Christiane Vollaire and photographer Philippe Bazin. It combines critical documentary photography and field philosophy around the driving force of solidarity.

An Archipelago of Solidarity presents the power of solidarity networks in the face of destructive global policies. It thus prompts reflection on “another political possibility” and the energy of the common good.

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La radicalisation du monde

Philippe Bazin / Christiane Vollaire / Georges Didi-Huberman

For over twenty years, Philippe Bazin has photographed the faces of individuals within institutional settings (hospitals, hospices, schools, prisons, etc.). This vast artistic project on the faces of our contemporaries explores the presence of humankind within the institutions that frame our lives from birth to death, as Michel Foucault discussed in his work, but also raises the question of individuality. Through photography, he aims to restore a face to people who, absent from our gaze, have often disappeared from collective visibility.

Each face is presented as an affirmation of presence in the world, made of flesh and a gaze with which we must reckon.

Philippe Bazin's photographs avoid all psychologizing, all pathos, and do not seek to unveil a supposed interiority; nor are they social in nature, but rather attempt to empty the subject of any external presence. One could consider that Bazin establishes a kind of collective memory, sometimes drawn from the fringes of our society.

This monograph brings together and concludes, in five hundred and eighty-five photographs, the entirety of his work on the theme of portraiture. It is accompanied by a new essay by the philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman and a text by the philosopher Christiane Vollaire, which examine this unique body of work from the perspectives of aesthetics, the history of photography, and politics.

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