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Introduction to Chinese youth, beyond the imposed stereotypes When we talk about “Ba ling hou” (born after the 1980s) in China, we are actually talking about the first generation born under the one-child policy and raised during the reform and opening up led by Deng Xiaoping after the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). This generation grew up together with the Internet and social media, melting into a consumer society that is totally in rupture with the preceding generations. Luo Yang, a photographer born in 1984, is also one of them. In 2007, at the age of 23, Luo started the series Girls, which brought her international recognition. For ten years, Luo Yang followed more than a hundred of women from her generation, recording changes to their bodies and their lives, observing and capturing their delicate transition to adulthood. It's as if the photographer was capturing their (her) emotions as a young woman by holding a mirror up to her own growth and evolution alongside those of her models. Now, Luo Yang is in her late 30s. In the new series Youth that she started in 2019, Luo shifts her focus to a younger generation born in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She continues to explore through Generation Z the changes of contemporary China now globalized and reached on a new scale and tries to preserve a photographic trace of these “atypical characters” in a social context. From Girls to Youth, Luo Yang keeps “documenting” the post-teenagers and young adults that she met in her everyday life, using her works to tell the "story of youth" across generations. She depicts an emerging Chinese youth culture through her work that defies imposed expectations and stereotypes, showing evidence of her subjects’ individuality and personality. It is a personal account at femininity, gender, and identity that reflects the profound and ongoing changes taking place in our society.

Algeria 1961 Raymond Depardon, at the age of nineteen, was sent by the Delmas agency to report on a country in turmoil - the last stirrings of the Algerian war of independence. The young photographer captures his images at high speed; he collects about a hundred of them, all of them striking. He readily says that his awareness and sensitivity were decisively forged during this journey. Raymond Depardon exhumed these photos (some of which were published in "Un aller pour Alger", Points, 2010), and in a very strong and generous gesture, offered them to Éditions Barzakh and then to Images Plurielles, two publishers of numerous authors with an international reputation. The idea was born that Raymond Depardon should make another trip in 2019 to complete the 1961 photos with a "postscript". This he did from 15 to 24 September 2019. He photographed Algiers, still in black and white, in its abundant contemporaneity. He also spent five days in Oran, where he met up with the writer Kamel Daoud for long strolls through the city. These proved so powerful that it was decided to keep about 30 of them. Kamel Daoud, delighted by the project, wrote several texts. They are almost disjointed from the photos, they will be meditations or wild reveries. If we take up the distinction elaborated by Barthes, dear to Raymond Depardon: far from being "anchor-texts", they will be "relay-texts", autonomous in relation to the latter, without any apparent link with it, like "vision" texts.