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Landscapes presents a previously unpublished series by Marina Gadonneix who, over years of research, has brought together a collection of singular images: blue or green overlays, used as neutral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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.