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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?

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.

Landscapes presents a previously unpublished series by Marina Gadonneix who, over years of research, has brought together a collection of singular images: blue or green overlays, used as neutral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.

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.

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.

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.

In Recruit, Tomoko Sawada continues her work on the autoportrait at the heart of contemporary Japanese society. This time, she explores the identity photos which Japanese students take at the end of their studies when they start looking for work. She retains the well-established formal conventions - dress, posture, neutral facial expression - but adds a subtle variation. Starting with a fixed photographic method, which imitates the photobooth with its similar lighting, unchanging framework and pose-taking, she multiplies the images by playing on her hairdo, her makeup and her facial expression. She surprises the audience by showing difference which she renders possible and visible on her face, and demonstrates therefore the relative character of all appearance. The three contact sheets of portaits are arranged in a grid in the book, giving us a global vision of the number of photographs while inviting us to look from one face to the next.