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This year, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie gives a Carte Blanche to multimedia artist Thomas Mailaender, dedicating to him his first major retrospective in Paris. The artist, who aims to push the boundaries of photographic experimentation by exploring a wide variety of media, will occupy the two floors of the galleries of the Parisian institution.To continue this immersive and interactive exhibition, a book titled Les Belles Images, published by RVB BOOKS, presents all the artist''s works featured at the MEP and takes us behind the scenes of his studio. The book includes texts by Simon Baker and Luce Lebart.

Following in the great tradition of a noble and ancient genre, Charles Negre presents a series of ultra-contemporary still lifes he created at the end of the Parisian markets. The artist moves his camera out into the field, capturing abandoned remains in situ. Playing on the codes of advertising, the book Sidewalk Stills explores the visual charge of seemingly innocuous, disposable subjects, creating images that at once shock, delight and make visible food waste and overconsumption.

Since 2005, Corinne Vionnet has been working on mass tourism and the massive circulation of images. Paris Paris Paris follows on from the seriesthat made her famous. After studying several destinations, the artist turned her attention to one of the most photographed cities, and found numeroussites and monuments that feed an uninterrupted flow of images. The Swiss artist transforms the raw material she works with: standardized snapshots of hyper-frequented places that feed social networks. Her images, which reveal nothing of the considerable work involved in their creation (archive research, crowdsourcing and collage), question our collective memory and tourist behavior. Why do we always take and share the same images?

Out of Order is a collection of images I found between 2008 and 2013 on office liquidations websites that buy the entire stock of furniture from offices going out of business. Among the offerings of used office desks for sale are the office plants whose job it was to make office employees feel more human - to give them something to care for in these synthetic modular spaces. The objects pictured in these images are the aftermath and by-products of a Modernism infused with a disparity between free market optimism and its dystopic result.

Augustin Rebetez in his Swiss Jura House let his imagination run. With a bunch of friends, he builds sculptures, sets, stages and imagines an astonishing permanent theatre. His book takes us into a strange tale, haunted whith masked characters engaged in mysterious activities. As we discover the photographs we enter the author's world. A world where reality and fiction keep merging, where he both lives and creates.

The starting point of Laurence Aëgerter's facsimile Cathédrales, is the 1949 catalogue Cathedrals and churches of France, published by the Ministry of Public Works, Transport and Tourism. The artist placed the book by the window in her studio and allowed the incidence of natural light to impact a reproduction of the façade of the Saint-Étienne cathedral in Bourges. She photographed the book every minute during two hours, obtaining 120 photographs of light variations upon this unique image. The play of shadow and light of the Gothic architecture in the orignal photograph, is superimposed by a new shadow that slowly glide on the cathedral and, imperceptibly but irreparably, swallows it up. Aëgerter's photographs contain thus three stratified layers of times : the 12th century, 1949 and 2012. Cathédrales presents a photographic sequence and as we turn the pages, we are aware of the temporal dimension of this visual exploration, a metaphor of transcience.

Landscapes presents a previously unpublished series by Marina Gadonneix who, over years of research, has brought together a collection of singular images: blue or green overlays, used as neutral backgrounds for special effects in cinema and on television. Images between abstraction and figuration, place and non-place, fullness and emptiness, these landscapes, once subtracted from their matrix, may only be considered as images in their abstract representation. And these are indeed landscapes in the accompanying fiction, "Blackout," a text written for the series of images by Marcelline Delbecq. Between fiction and reality, real landscapes and mental landscapes, vision and drifting, the text, in its written form as well as in its form as a soundscript, may either add to or take away from the images, whose visual impact appeals to what's happening off screen as well as to what is beyond consciousness.

As a way of continuing the work he started in Album Beauty, Erik Kessels brings us new artwork, based on his own collection of photographs. In Mother Nature, he assembles photographs of women posing in front of flowered spaces, which include flowerbeds in public and private gardens, fields and beyond. This universal theme, which he identified within his own photo collection, allows us to observe repetition and difference, which weave through yielding a common narrative. The book gives us the oportunity to move between places, times, generations and cultures. The individual stories and the foreign faces create a whole within which we see our common and immutable practices. In his book, Erik Kessels renders these private photographs visible anew, creating a visual anthropology of lived moments.

Since the patenting of the modern beehive in 1852, the alternative techniques prior to this homogenisation have been overlooked. Using an array of archival images, this book uncovers that forgotten history in hive innovation, offering a renewed perspective to challenge conventional narratives and encourage reader speculation.

In October 2022, after a period dedicated to collage and image manipulation, Thomas Lelu decided to return to his origins, and began a series of sentences that he simply wrote down in a notebook with a ballpoint pen. From then on, he began a daily exercise of writing a minimum of 5 sentences in sketchbooks. A total of over 500 sentences to date. Sometimes funny or witty, often caustic and provocative, they invite the reader to reflect on our times and its excesses.

Gone Fishing tells the modern tale, through the form of a fictional correspondence, of a young man who prefers to go on holidays with his mates rather than bow to his new responsibilities as a father. As the letters progress, Thomas Mailaender paints the unflattering portrait of an adolescent, Ulysses, more inspired by beer, big-game fishing and table-tennis than by the joys of fatherhood. Each of the nineteen letters is illustrated by a portrait of the young father carrying out an appallingly banal exploit that is supposed to excuse his absence. These images are photomontages the artist has made from amateur photos he collected on the internet.

Since 2000, computer searches are leading to develop systems capable of recognising and interpreting human emotions. Clément Lambelet gets interested in process of facial automatic recognition and reflects upon its generalisation regarding to its development in every social media (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat). For the book Happiness is the only true emotion, he worked on a panel of portraits given by the Pain Express Set from Stirling University in Scotland, he selected one emotion per person, reframed images and saved only the face. The artist manipulated each photograph and worked on its materiality to get more expressive images. These portraits become a vector of emotion. Each picture is then submitted to the Microsoft Cognitive Emotion API challenging the accuracy of these systems. The Emotion API only recognises Happiness with certitude.

In this subtle sequel of his rearrangement of the Thai adult magazine "Siam's Guy", Tiane Doan na Champassak revisits a number of issues from the iconic magazine "Paris-Hollywood", launched in France in the 1940s. In the middleof its pages, the original magazine had the particularity of offering pin-ups in relief or on tracing paper that the readers could undress. By using his extensive arsenal of postmodern tools, Doan na Champassak cannibalizes the original content with his own photographs, creating a hypnotic dialogue between then and now, recto-verso, dressed-undressed, Bangkok-Paris, Paris-Hollywood. In addition, the alternation between censoring the genitalia and hiding the identity adds a thought-provoking rhythm to the whole.

With VERSO Thomas Sauvin revisits his collection of ID photos amassed in China over the last fifteen years. By exposing them to a strong light source, the characters inscribed on the back of the prints show through by transparency and materialize on unfamiliar faces.

The British visual artist Steve Harries explores the force and fragility of our environment. In his book Octopus, he turns his attention more specifically to mountain landscapes and their glaciers. Over the last ten years, Harries has produced a corpus of photographs of mountains around the world, inspired in particular by the geological processes behind their formation and their morphological features. His experience with still life photography has also inspired him to hone in on certain geological details. Recently, his discovery of Marianne Moore's poem "An Octopus" (1924) changed how he views his own photographs, prompting him to organize them differently. He has therefore put together a more freely composed sequence, emulating Moore's approach by overlaying images created in differing ways and instilling a bold formal dialogue that encourages a new appreciation of mountain landscapes.

The twenty-one landscapes featured in this book were conceived in March 2022 during a photography workshop led by Alexandre Guirkinger and arranged by the exhibition space and resource center Stimultania in partnership with the CADA Le Moulin reception center for asylum seekers and the non-profit organization Forum réfugiés. Eight migrants having recently settled in Givors took part in the workshop. Ali Rahmani, Fkadu A. , Habibollah R. , Nasim Rahimi, Nicole M. , Nuhas K. , Omid M. and Souleyman N. first identified the places that made an impression on them when they arrived in the city, that they visit every day, that they especially like, or that typify France for them. Following an initial scouting phase, the landscapes were produced using an 8-by-10-inch view camera in dialogue with Alexandre Guirkinger. All of the participants printed contact sheets for their photographs and then wrote captions for them in their native languages.

The eighteen landscapes featured in this book were conceived in October 2020 during a photography workshop led by Alexandre Guirkinger and arranged by the art center and publisher Le Point du Jour in partnership with the non-profit organization Itinérance. Six migrants having recently settled in Cherbourg and receiving assistance from Itinérance took part in the workshop. Ahmed Agadaguib, Fahim Ahmed, Mamadou Baïlo Bah, Amine Djouadi, Abdullakh Ushurov and Abdulfahim Zahiri first identified the places having made a distinct impression on them from their arrival in the city, that they visit every day, that they especially like, or that typify France for them. Following an initial scouting phase, the landscapes were produced using an 8-by-10-inch view camera in dialogue with Alexandre Guirkinger. All of the participants printed contact sheets for their photographs and then wrote captions for them in their native languages.

BETTER FOOD FOR OUR FIGHTING MEN contains a selection of images, produced mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, from the archives of the U. S. Army's Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center near Boston, Massachusetts. The center is still operational today, and employs both military personnel and civilian contractors in its mission to improve the daily lives-and diets-of American soldiers. For the world's most formidable army, feeding the troops is fraught with logistical, psychological and food safety challenges. Bacteria is an enemy; supply chains are vital, intricate delivery systems. The goal is to provide sustenance and boost morale across the full range of terrain and troop configurations, from mess halls for the officers and selfservice buffets for the rank-and-file to battlefield canteens and survival rations for commandos behind enemy lines. Solving this logistical puzzle is like trying to stuff a square peg into a round hole: once you have devised ways to optimize the daily nutritional requirements of the bodies in question, you need to work out the best solutions for preserving and transporting the food, and still guarantee a minimum level of flavor to keep the soldiers happy. A glossary with 24 entries explains some of the acronyms used in the image captions, describes the staples of a typical soldier's diet and traces the new technologies that enabled the food industry to manufacture and supply those rations.

In Flanders, between 2014 and 2020, David De Beyter gained acceptance and trust in the "Big Bangers" community of stock car enthusiasts who demolish or burn vehicles that would otherwise be consigned to the scrap heap for the beauty of the gesture and the sheer nihilistic pleasure of the spectacle. Each wreck resulting from this destructive practice is called an "auto sculpture" in the community's lingo. De Beyter's immersive project thus involved a combined artistic and anthropological approach, as is evident in Build and Destroy. In its very format, the book resonates with the experience of destruction as observed by the artist and o! ers an aptly fragmentary reading of this brutal culture. Bringing together photographs, photograms from 16 mm " lms and extracts from family archives, Build and Destroy o! ers itself as a visual essay that examines the material as subject as much as it investigates the formal possibilities opened up by the materiality of images.

Filled with colors and tangy memories, PLAY, Philippe Jarrigeon's first monograph, celebrates 15 years of a photography that is free of expression and deliciously deviant. Published by RVB Books under the artistic direction of Beda Achermann, the book gathers a collection of personal and editorial shots of mixed genres, between portraits, still lives and landscapes. The polysemic term PLAY is the GAME echoing with the insolence and the sense of humor that inhabit each image. It is the acting GAME evoking the major role held by the models who are staged. It is also the start of a video, a tune... a new GAME. Imagine the fantasy, the colors, the attention to detail; Cher Horowitz from Clueless coexisting with Carlotta Valdes from Vertigo; Wheel of Fortune, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown's gazpacho, a TV show set mock up; all of this conversing together, and you will get a catalogue of images with, as common thread, the fabulous universe of 1990s television and cinema. All of it forms a visual library of our collective pop culture, with one peculiarity: everything seems offbeat. The sequence of images here has been thought out like a zapping session, where glam goes hand in hand with plain consumer good, the exceptional with the trivial, the beautiful with the ugly, the too serious with the too funny. The locations that have been photographed seem faker than movie sets, as the young models mimic the big stars. PLAY is the parody of a logbook, the diary of a great Hollywood studio at the teen years of Golden Age.

The pickle is a recurring figure in Erwin Wurm's work. In 2008, he created an installation titled 'Selbstportra?t all Gurken' (Self-portrait in pickles). To compose the piece, he emptied a jar of pickles, encapsulating each one with painted resin, and placing them on individual pedestals. Each condiment was then photographed following the same protocol. The artist's book 'Self-portrait as 47 Pickles' presents this series of photographs.

After a year of research in the archives of the Vasarely Foundation in Aix en Provence, Oran Hoffmann has appropriated the original materials of the large-scale works of the artist Victor Vasarely. He insulated the ceramic tiles, the aluminum pieces and the sheets of paper and then photographed each of these elements separately. Thus he frees himself from the spectacular dimension of the works of Vasarely, we unveil behind the scenes and leads us to the genesis of their creation. With his minimal photographic compositions Oran Hoffmann explores the world of Vasarely and also develops a contemporary interpretation.