beaux livres : photo, architecture, art

Sauvage matérialité

Jean-Christophe Béchet

In the 2000s, Jean-Christophe Béchet starts experimenting with photographic matter. With an interest in accident-born images, his experimentation of 20 years peaks with the hybridization of silver and digital techniques, whose inventive and striking results are compiled in this book.

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African Memories

Jean-Christophe Béchet

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.

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Rio Praia

Jean-Christophe Béchet

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.

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Rio Centro

Jean-Christophe Béchet

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...

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Macadam Color Street Photography

Jean-Christophe Béchet / Jean-Luc  Monterosso / Sylvie Hugues / Michel Poivert

For several decades, Jean-Christophe Béchet has been pursuing a photographic career characterized by street photography, or what is known as street photo, a genre whose name has been perpetuated by the American photographic tradition.

In this new book, he revisits photographs taken throughout his career that particularly question the different situations of this type of photography. Through a hundred selected photographs and three interviews with image specialists, he seeks to question what this photography is, what it can bring into play, attempting to define some of its contours.

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URSS ÉTÉ 1991

Jean-Christophe Béchet

August 1991: I buy a ticket on Aeroflot and arrive in Moscow just as this strange coup d'état is unfolding. Gorbachev loses what little credibility he has left, and Boris Yeltsin delivers the coup de grâce to a Soviet Union in the throes of decay.
Thirty years later, Jean-Christophe Béchet reconstructs his account of the fall of a historical monument through photographs and documents from the period, in both images and text.

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Habana Song

Jean-Christophe Béchet

Photographer Jean-Christophe Béchet traveled to Cuba in 1990, at a time when the “Balseros” were attempting to reach the American coast of Florida on their makeshift rafts. He returned to Havana twenty years later, upon the death of Fidel Castro, discovering a city undergoing profound change. The American cars are still there, but they have become taxis for tourists. Along the Malecon, buildings are being renovated and luxury bars are springing up...

He decided to steer clear of this tourist spectacle, preferring to lose himself in the dark streets in search of those Cuban sensations: between poverty and class, order and anarchy.

Habana Song is a visual poem he plays out in black and white, far from the clichés and colors that usually identify Cuba. Music accompanies us throughout this photographic stroll.

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European Puzzle

Jean-Christophe Béchet

Since 1985, Jean-Christophe Béchet has been photographing Europe, traveling from city to city. Today, he knows virtually every nook and cranny of this continent. But which Europe are we talking about? There's economic Europe, political Europe, geographical Europe, football Europe… There are many Europes. From Gibraltar to Kyiv, from Reykjavik to Istanbul. Some borders are crumbling, others are closing. Cross-fertilization, melting pot, mixing, globalization. Europeanization? Does a Western Europe and an Eastern Europe still exist? And a Southern Europe around the Mediterranean? Sometimes, words quickly lose their meaning. By losing its last syllable, Europe has now become a mere currency.

“To question Europe is to question one’s own European identity. In what way am I European? Beyond the economic questions that too often dictate the ‘European sentiment,’ I want to try to construct this puzzle like a long musical melody rooted in the reality of the last thirty years. In 1955, Henri Cartier-Bresson published The Europeans. Sixty years later, when everyone is constantly talking about Europe, such a subject seems impossible to contemplate… Yet isn’t the challenge of photography precisely to offer a poetic and documentary vision when words, figures, and analyses have already exhausted their interpretation of reality?” Jean-Christophe Béchet

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