beaux livres : photo, architecture, art

Sabine Meier went to New York with the idea of ​​creating a portrait of Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov, the famous character created by the Russian writer Dostoevsky. Armed only with her memories of reading the novel several years earlier, she wandered the streets of New York. It was during these wanderings that she recognized in the face of a passerby the man who would become her Raskolnikov. How did she manage to convince this stranger to embody the image of this fictional character? A long collaboration began between them, and “Portrait of a Man” was born.

This book is structured like a work of fiction, like a “photographic” view of the mind, aiming to create a mental portrait of the protagonist of Crime and Punishment. If we are to speak of a photographic adaptation, it is neither a faithful rendering of the novel’s narrative nor its contemporary illustration: the novel is a source from which Sabine Meier has freely drawn the material for her photographs.

Martine Lacas’s text takes shape from Sabine Meier’s photographs. Not to return to the starting point or, like a meticulous iconographer, to find what from the novel has been translated into each image, but to allow the reader to grasp, within the act of reading, the dynamic of such a process. This text is therefore neither a commentary on the photographs nor an illustration of them.

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