Jean Luc Tartarin borrows images from the history of photography, which he reproduces in a file he calls “premier”, from which he can experiment with different interventions until he achieves the work he deems to be the best.
When he takes an old silver photograph, once scanned, it becomes like a negative. The raw file, of a particular nature, enables Jean Luc Tartarin to undertake the work of constructing a new image in a kind of digital alchemy. After this long process of invention, combining pleasure and struggle with virtual matter, the final file is embodied in the materiality of a print on chromogenic paper. The book is organized around three main iconographic themes: figures, flowers and forests. Forests have always been an important subject in the artist’s photographic research, which he has been pursuing for over fifty years.

Jean Luc Tartarin est né à Metz en 1951. Il vit et travaille dans la proche région de Metz. Autodidacte, il est lauréat du Prix Niepce en 1971. En 1972, à l’école des Beaux Arts de Metz, il devient le premier professeur de photographie dans une école d’art en France, fonction qu’il a occupé jusqu’en 2013.

Engagé dès le début des années 1970 dans une pratique artistique, où le médium photographique est exploré dans ses multiples facettes, dont la forêt, les arbres, deviennent le sujet de prédilection qui se construit dans la proximité du territoire de l’enfance. 

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.

In 2003, in the singular setting of the ghost town of Cook, Australia, Laurent Mulot “implanted” the first Middle of Nowhere Contemporary Art Center with the only two inhabitants of this small town. This book is a monograph looking back on more than 20 years of research and encounters around the world, which gradually enabled the author to collaborate with astrophysicists on the notion of the “Middle of Nowhere”.

The work was analyzed by contemporary art historian and critic Paul Ardenne.

Laurent Mulot est un havrais basé à Lyon, en France. Il travaille autant à l’atelier que sur le terrain. Il utilise la performance, la photographie, le son, la vidéo dans une pratique d’installation multimédia. Le résultat s’incarne dans Middle of Nowhere, une oeuvre en cours qui prolifère depuis ses Centres d’art contemporains fantômes implantés sur les six continents. Il collabore avec certaines des plus importantes expériences mondiales de recherches fondamentales et avec des scientifiques spécialistes des particules à hautes énergies. C’est le cas pour les travaux Augenblick, Thinkrotron, et Aganta Kairos, qui continuent de creuser l’indicible au milieu de nulle part. En 2022, Middle of Nowhere s’enrichit d’un nouveau corpus nommé Origine, avec une œuvre s’intitulant Lawal Quilcas, qui
explore la relation des scientifiques et des indiens Mapuches avec les arbres millénaires de la Patagonie septentrionale…

This boxed set includes 8 items (books, leporello, posters) for an exceptional experience at the crossroads of contemporary art and archaeology. In 2014, artist Mirela Popa began a project based on the archaeological excavations carried out in Ivry Confluence, notably on the grounds of the former BHV depots, and the preventive excavation campaigns organized on sites dating from the Neolithic period, doomed to disappear due to the necessities of urban expansion. Working in close collaboration with archaeologists, the artist’s work was thus marked by an extensible chronology: from one changing territory to another, from the Neolithic to the contemporary period.

Artiste d’origine roumaine installée en France depuis 1994 et à Ivry-sur-Seine depuis 2014, Mirela Popa déploie son langage artistique à travers le dessin, la photographie, l’installation et la performance, où se rencontrent temporalités et polarités Est-Ouest. Déplacement, extraction, nomadisme, exil. Sa grammaire est celle de l’introspection dont elle se détache pour évoquer la grande migration, à l’échelle de la planète et ses bouleversements telluriques.

« In the tireless quest of capturing the ephemeral, Franck London takes us through a photographic journey across a whirlpool of images, as so many fragments of truth fixed in eternity. IN-TIME, this feverish continuation of his previous book EX-TIME, plunges the lector in a universe where the past and the present crash into a perpetuons chaos. Just like an archeologist of the moment, he searches the depths of human soul, digging up fragments of emotions and intimacy. In his book, IN-TIME, Franck Landron invites the lector to an introspective trip through photographic decades, where each photographs is a burst of the memory, vibrating to the rhythm of fainted emotions […]. Franck Landron transcends the frontiers of photography to gift us a deep sensorial, artistic and emotional experience. Each photograph is at the same time a wound and a redemption, scar on the cloth of time that invites one to plunge into the depths of one’s consciousness, to explore the mysteries of the existence through an artistic prism. Each scene tells a universal story. And while IN-TIME’s pages turn, we cling to the hope that the final chapter of this photographic saga still holds many revelations in store. » (Sandra Mercoeur) 

Franck Landron est né à Herblay en 1957. À 13 ans, il a son premier choc esthétique avec Man Ray et commence à réaliser des rayogrammes. Il dit s’être « décidé très jeune de photographier toutes les images du film qui défileraient dans sa tête au moment de sa mort ». Cet impératif le contraint
à écrire sa vie quotidienne en images. Il s’empare de tous les sujets même si à l’instar d’autres photographes précoces, il débute avec ce qui l’entoure : les membres de sa famille, les amis… Il ne s’interdit rien pour restituer le sujet de son image au plus juste et multiplie les recherches plastiques
et les techniques photographiques. Depuis plus de quarante ans, il reconstruit patiemment une vie en images. À ce jour, plus de 400 000 photographies composent son œuvre inclassable.

Running away into you is the first photographic book by Portuguese director Mário Macedo. In the form of an intimate testimony, this book narrates an amorous wandering that lasted almost ten years, smoky encounters and parties between Zagreb, Berlin, Copenhagen or Lisboa, like snapshots from an European youth trying to slow down the rhythm of our capitalist societies.