Structure

(Hardback)

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Description

Inspired by the work of the Becher couple, whose aesthetic of objectivity tended towards minimalism, and by that of the American photographer Mike Disfarmer, produced in Arkansas in the 1940s, Isabelle Boccon-Gibod, self-taught and autonomous in her practice, has played with the same frontality to express the idea that our bodies, when assembled, form architectures. That in the absence of a smile, the face offers a singular neutrality of expression: the masks fall off and all that remains is a nudity (a naked truth) that must be admired and deciphered beyond the appearances of any social game. This principle of a raw structure, where the eyes catch, has guided her work, without limiting herself to it.

Author Bio

Isabelle Boccon-Gibod began making use of photography when she lived in England, and has largely devoted herself to it since her return to Paris in 2004. She has taught History of Photography at the Paris College of Arts. A graduate of the Ecole Centrale School of Engineering and a former student at Columbia University, after a brilliant career in the paper industry, she now serves as non-executive director on the boards of six French industrial companies. In addition, she has made a career as an author in France : she has published Fors intrieurs, rendez-vous avec des mathmaticiens (Leo Scheer, 2011), which received a special mention from the dAlembert Prize (2012) and Entre leurs mains, enqute sur lexercice du pouvoir (Plein jour, 2014). Structure is her second book of photographs, after Sous les ponts, Paris, published in 2014 by Editions Verlhac. She has shown her photographs and videos in Paris, Brussels and Haifa. The American writer and literary critic Daniel Mendelsohn has won numerous awards including the National Book Critics Circle in 2006, the French 2007 prix Mdicis for foreign literature and the French Book of the Year prize (given by Lire magazine) for his book The Lost. His latest works are An Odyssey: a Father, a Son and an Epic (2017) and Three Rings (2020). He is professor of classical literature at Bard College, and a contributor to the New York Review of Books. For his introduction to Structure, he wove together links between Isabelle Boccon-Gibods work and his own family history. It comes as no surprise that a writer such as Daniel Mendelsohn would be so moved by these portraits. It can clearly be stated here that literature is a photograph without images, and photography, a fiction without words.