Sophie RistelhueberOperations

A lavish retrospective monograph, conceived in close collaboration with the artist, with three essays, an illustrated and commented chronology, the major works since the early 1980s (as well as numerous documents and exhibition views) and a bio-bibliography, on almost 500 pages.

The book, the first to be devoted to Ristelhueber's work, is structured around three very specific points of view: a highly researched scientific perspective by David Mellor; a personal point of view by Bruno Latour; and a text by Thomas Schlesser on the reception of Sophie Ristelhueber's work by the specialist and general press, and in particular around the notion of photojournalism and art.

The first part of the book (‘Ensembles’) presents a selection of some twenty works, assembled visually rather than chronologically. The second part (‘Chronologies’) brings together all the artist's works from 1980 to 2008, viewed in documentary mode, combining quotations from various authors and from Sophie Ristelhueber herself, with numerous photographs from exhibitions.

Sophie Ristelhueber (born in Paris in 1949) is one of the leading figures in photographic art today. Since her seminal work on the war-torn city of Beirut in the early 1980s, she has pursued a demanding body of work that tests the conditions under which reality is made visible. She develops a committed reflection on the territory and its history through a singular approach to the landscape, conceived as a space bearing traces of human activity and the memory of major upheavals (major historical wars, recent conflicts, civil wars, earthquakes), interrogating, in the manner of an archaeologist, the marks left by man on the surface and making visible the stigmata of history.

Ristelhueber's work, which implies a complete personal commitment and fieldwork, borrows its tools (photography) and one of its major themes (war) from reportage, but folds them into the procedures of art: her work is not built around the documentary project of representing, but from the aesthetic project of questioning the notion of trace, on bodies and on places.

Attentive to the medium of photographs, whether hung on a museum scale or reproduced in books, the artist also uses other types of image (such as video) and installation devices to construct different forms capable of recapturing reality.