“This book is a dive into the most private aspect of my practice. Since 2006, I have been keeping a visual journal, paying attention to signs and looking for fragments of what my universe is made of. I pursue the fragile tracks of ephemeral things, everywhere, at all times, these things so easily found, so hardly remembered. I see this journal as a film without scenario where the artwork comes to life on my table before it does in the book. Each chapter is a route, a sped-up slice of life, a record of the world’s relentless movement. Une poignée d’étoiles is a reference to my nocturnal shootings during lockdown, with a symbolic will to transform chaos into cosmos. Besides the photographs are brief texts, excerpts from my journal. I see the whole as new images, like literary contact sheets.” (Bertrand Carrière)

Wild Rumors takes its origins in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or The Whale published in 1851. Seen as a critical-thinking tool fit to tackle the contemporary world and as a map of our own movements, this novel constituted the filter of the shared experience and research lead both in France and in Detroit (MI) since 2016. This book tests and verifies the intuition according to which Melville’s novel, its factory-ship, obsessional captain and disciplined crew foreshadowed the world in which we live. Preferring the fictionalization over the compiling of research results, the book links fiction, field experience and research in art and human sciences. What could the “white whale” Achab longed for be today? Have those who witnessed the disaster seen it? Do they know where the ship is, or what happened to its crew?

During 2018 and 2019, Franck Gérard was invited to stay several times at the Camargo Foundation, located in the heart of the exceptional and protected site of the famous Calanques of Marseille. As usual, the photographer immersed himself in the landscape, photographing people, places, and situations he encountered during his daily walks.

As in his book En l’état, he always knows how to highlight a comical situation or reveal a view of incredible beauty to his audience.

He continued what he now often develops in the projects he undertakes: he accompanies his photography with writing, somewhere between a work journal and a literary narrative. Lively and earthy, light and serious like his photographic gaze, his writing draws the reader into his encounters, sharing his impressions and sensations.

The journal format was the obvious choice. A book in which we discover the Calanques through a narrative that weaves its way through the pages between photographs and text. A book in which image and text reinforce each other.

english version 

A poetic ethnography of love.

It all started with a blog, 365degreesoflove, on which artist Alice Khol collected love stories that she paired with her photographs. 365 degrees, like 365 variations on a theme. There are billions of them, and this book is a Pantone color chart. Taking the pulse of everyday life, she collected our love stories, which come in the form of anecdotes, turn us into poets, mark our bodies forever or for the duration of an evening, through love letters or Tinder conversations… Love that scratches or hurts, that soothes us, transports us, and transforms us. The kind that always makes us vibrate. The emotion capable of generating all others.

Guided by the memory of a woman with a snake’s body, glimpsed in the fall of 1976 in a shack at the Negreni fair (Transylvania), Emmanuel Raquin-Lorenzi sets out to explore the various forms of representation and expression found among the populations of the Three Cries basin (the Rapid, the Black, and the White), mountain rivers that border the Lake Country in the northwestern Romanian Carpathians.

An ethnographic field study conducted over more than twenty years allows the narrator to recount his gradual discovery of the thought processes specific to the mixed populations of this ancient country. At the end of the book, there is a small anthology of texts by writers from this strange country.

But upon closing the book, readers may no longer be able to distinguish between reality and a certain fiction. They may even wonder who Emmanuel Raquin-Lorenzi really is…