beaux livres : photo, architecture, art

Distance ludique, distance critique ?

Christiane Vollaire / Lydia Martin / Alain Bernardini

This book is based on the concept of distance, as it lies at the heart of the concept of play: to say that there is play is to say that there is a space between the two parts of a mechanism, which allows it to function. Distance is also precisely the condition for a critical gaze. Starting from a historical and conceptual questioning of the relationship between play and work, this book combines the research of a psychologist and a philosopher on the power relations that these relationships induce and the contemporary uses of play, in its sporting as well as theatrical, physical as well as digital forms.

The question of management, central to the contemporary world of work, is addressed both through the psychologist's reflective experience in the field of business and through its historical roots and connections, from industrial Fordism to political authoritarianism. The book concludes with a reflection on the notion of power games, central to Michel Foucault's thinking in analyzing contemporary forms of government as well as in supporting the possibility of counter-powers.

Alain Bernardini's photographic work playfully illuminates the questioning.

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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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