Chis year again, books devoted to photography abound in bookstores in the run-up to Christmas. Intimate stories or reports, collections of portraits of anonymous people or stars, successions of rural panoramas or urban explorations, realistic or dreamlike visions, the editorial offering is very rich. “Le Point” helps you find your way by pointing out its eight favorite titles here.
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The decisive moment of Jean-Michel André
“The photographic shock […] consists less in traumatizing than in revealing what was hidden,” writes Roland Barthes in The Clear Room. This quote, placed at the forefront of Jean-Michel André's seventh book, perfectly reflects the use that its author makes of his art: representing to repair what can be repaired. This photographer has just won the prestigious Nadar prize (the equivalent of the Goncourt) for his latest opus.
Jean-Michel André addresses a particularly sensitive subject, a moment that turned his life upside down when he was 6 years old. On August 4, 1983, his father was murdered in Avignon where his family had stopped for the night on the way to Corsica. Jean-Michel André has almost no memory of the hours he spent in room 207 which adjoined that of the tragedy. The trauma of the event erased all traces of the event from him.
ALSO READ Christmas gifts: 10 beautiful cookbooks to slip under the treeHaving reached adulthood, he tried to recover his memory through photography by reconstructing the route which had led him from Dakar to Avignon but also by continuing his journey to Corsica, the objective of this mourning vacation. This trip during which he took just under a hundred photos (exhibited until February 2 at the Hospice-Comtesse museum in Lille) transforms these dark hours into a magnificent collection of images.
Without pathos or sensationalism, his photos question the limits of representation: what can we show of an internal upheaval of such magnitude? How can we make the void tangible and, above all, reach as many people as possible by transforming an intimate individual experience into a universal subject?
*Room 207152 pages, afterword by Clément Chéroux, Actes Sud, €39.
The blows to the heart of Dolorès Marat
When she talks about her work, Dolorès Marat often talks about the physical sensation she experiences before triggering her camera. “To take a photo, I have to feel a strong emotion. It happens in the stomach. It’s a feeling that’s hard to describe but I have to feel it within myself,” she says. The photographer, winner of the Robert-Delpire book prize last year, today publishes a sublime work in which her unique universe unfolds.
ALSO READ Magnetic Dolorès Marat, photographer of the “blue hour” Most of the photos it contains were taken as the sun sets: at that interstitial hour between day and night. “The moment of miracles,” smiles Dolorès Marat who populates her images with marvelous beings: surveyors of the world straight out of a Kafka short story, trees that seem to be moving, disturbing women. Taken sometimes in Paris, sometimes in Corsica, in the United States or in the Middle East, his photos open the doors to a parallel world, a consoling universe: that of dreams.
*Dolores Maratpreface by Magali Jauffret (Delpire & co, 144 pages, €49).
Family portraits of Tina Barney
His first retrospective scheduled at the Jeu de Paume in Paris (until January 19) is a great success. The American photographer Tina Barney published, at the same time, with Aperture (in co-publishing with the Xavier Barral workshop) a sumptuous book presenting the work she has been developing since the mid-1970s. The opportunity to discover the family portraits which made its reputation.
The artist has in fact focused his gaze for fifty years on this central subject: the links between the different generations of the same clan. After starting by immortalizing her own tribe, Tina Barney gradually broadened her scope of intervention to other families, some from the European continent.
ALSO READ The eight photo exhibitions not to be missed across FranceIf the environment she probes has long been that of the “high society” of the East Coast, the reality she captures is universal: the wish, among parents, to transmit to their children, beyond a certain level of life, the keys to an often worrying outside world. With this worry of not quite achieving it.
*Family Tiestexts by Quentin Bajac, Sarah Meister and James Welling (Aperture/EXB, 176 pages, €52).
So who is Koudelka?
He is one of the great masters of contemporary photography. One of the most secret too. Josef Koudelka, pillar of the Magnum agency, does not like to tell his stories. Few have managed to extract a secret from him about his life. Suffice it to say that the richly illustrated biography that Melissa Harris is publishing today is an achievement.
Over the course of interviews patiently conducted over ten years, at his home in Ivry-sur-Seine, the photo-reporter of Czech origin spoke like never before… about his family, about his childhood, spent in Valchov, in Moravia. But also on the key moments of his existence. Like those days in the summer of 1968 when he documented the entry of Russian tanks into Prague. Koudelka also explains, in this work, the way in which he sees his profession. A great book about an immense photographer.
*Josef Koudelka Nextby Mélissa Harris, translation by Séverine Weiss (editions Delpire, 352 pages, €42).
The dazzling darkness of Daido Moriyama
“Taking a photograph is incidentally memorizing a certain point in an endless time tunnel,” says Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, one of the pioneers of “street photography.” » The 300 photos, collected in his new book, illustrate this point.
ALSO READ IN PICTURES. Arles meetings: the Japanese miracleThe title of the work published by Editions Textuel, under the direction of Mark Holborn, is both a nod to the journal Record created by Moriyama in 1972 and a play on words. Recording a world populated by spectacular visions, Daido Moriyama's work has an exceptional performative dimension.
His shots depicting the violence of Japanese society plunge the observer into a climate of permanent tension. His images are both unfathomably dark and sparklingly beautiful. Wherever he looks, from the alleys of Tokyo to the gardens of Saitama via the markets of Kobe, Moriyama captures sparks of life to create paintings that invite contemplation.
*Record 2 (Textuel editions, 352 pages, €69).
Spotlight on Plossu
A beautiful retrospective is currently dedicated to him at the Musée de Provence (until March 9). At the same time, Bernard Plossu joined the legendary Photo Poche collection, now published by Actes Sud. The opportunity to look back on the journey of one of the most talented photographers of his generation.
It all starts with a journey. In 1965, young Bernard was 20 years old. He leaves France for Mexico. Fascinated by hippie culture, he heads to California and crosses the United States by car with friends his age. He will meet great figures of the American counterculture and witness the famous Summer of Love.
ALSO READ These singular summers – 1967, “Summer of Love”, really? In the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, he frequented the legendary City Lights bookstore frequented by members of the Beat Generationmet Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez and Henry Miller with whom he shared a taste for wandering. From then on, his life will resemble an endless road trip. From India to Mali, from Spain to Italy, his journeys, often made in the company of his wife, herself a photographer (huge Françoise Nuñez, died in 2021), have shaped his outlook and constitute the central subject of his abundant work .
*Bernard Plossuintroduction by Laurie Hurwitz, translation by Émilie Fernandez, afterword by Bruno Carbone (Actes Sud editions, Photo Poche, 144 pages, €14.50).
The golden age of American cinema in the spotlight at Taschen
From 1936 to 1972, the magazine Life devoted nearly 230 covers to cinema. Taschen Editions today offers those nostalgic for the heyday of the Californian studios, the “moguls” and the real stars, a collection of photographic reports published in the pages of this title.
The box set of two books that the German house is publishing today brings together, on more than 700 pages, portraits and period interviews with the actors and actresses, directors and producers of this bygone era: from Greta Garbo to Marilyn Monroe, from Rita Hayworth to Jane Russell, Lana Turner, Carole Lombard, Audrey Hepburn, Gene Tierney and Hedy Lamarr. A particularly glamorous chapter in Hollywood history.
*Hollywood (1936-1972)introduction by Lucy Sante (Taschen editions, 708 pages, €200).
The photo lesson
Behind the apparent simplicity of photographic art lies a long history, that of a technique of “recording reality” that is more than a century old. Laurent Jullier, professor at the European and Audiovisual Institute of the University of Nancy, invites us to discover this story over the course of seven educational chapters.
His book has no other ambition than to teach us to see the world differently by offering us useful reading keys to better understand the power of images. In particular their ability to make us embrace reality in a more emotional than rational mode. “A photo is not a window, it is first and foremost a look…” we read. Understand: a reflection, in every sense of the word.
To Discover
Kangaroo of the day
Answer
*Learn to look at photography, by Laurent Jullier (Editions Flammarion, 176 pages, €14.90).
