A member of the Magnum agency, Paolo Pellegrin is one of the great photojournalists of his generation. The visual power of his images bears witness to the political, economic and ecological upheavals of the world. His inquisitive mind leads him to put his lens on subjects that are sometimes more contemplative, where nature holds a major place. Thus, during a stay in Japan, the photographer, who went to attend the famous sakura zensen or cherry blossom, is seized by the majesty of a colony of eagles. In Kyoto, the Shimogamo temple, located in the delta of the Kamo-Gawa river, stands in the heart of the Tadasu no Mori forest, or "forest of truth". This Shinto shrine, dating back to the 7th century, is nestled in the middle of a primary forest populated by eagles. Hovering above the visitors, emerging from the foliage with their wings spread, the eagles fly close to the photographer. Their dazzling speed is captured in tight framing: the birds seem to jump out of the frame or fly out of it at full speed. The choreographies follow one another: as a soloist, in duet or in group, these fascinating birds of prey seem to glide through space. Standing out against saturated black and white skies, Pellegrin's eagles stare at us, challenge us, surprise us. Their majesty forces the admiration: they glide, sketch many acrobatics. Their remiges become fingers, their wings become capes. Defying the laws of gravity, immersed in the depths of the undergrowth, Pellegrin's birds invite us to enter a mysterious and ghostly world, where only the animal presence reigns.

This book brings together the photographs that Bruce Gilden took in Japan during two residencies and several trips between 1995 and 1999, presenting both the most iconic and half of the unpublished ones. As always, on an impulse of a few fractions of a second, the Magnum photographer gets as close as possible to his subjects and catches them on the fly. In Tokyo and Osaka, he looks for impenetrable places and is interested in the communities that Japanese society tries to hide, especially the yakuzas, motorcycle gangs, marginal people... The result is a gallery of disturbing and fascinating portraits. Twenty years later Inspired by the exhibition on "The New Japanese Photography" at MoMA in 1974, Bruce Gilden arrived in Japan twenty years later for a first six-month residency at the Villa Medici, followed by a second three-month residency in 1998 in the followed by a second residency of three months in 1998 within the framework of the Japan Foundation and several trips until 2000. With his Leica, he leaves every day, at dawn, to explore a Japan that we don't know, the one of the people on the fringe in the big Japanese metropolises, especially in the dangerous district of Sanya where gangsters I thought I had landed in another world, a kind of Japanese version of the Court of Miracles, where all the day laborers, the destitute, the alcoholics and other socially excluded losers live from day to day. In the evening they light braziers to keep warm and in the early morning they queue up in the hope of being hired by the yakuzas for a small job. I took the subway almost every day to arrive at 5:30 in the morning, in the dark, alone, and trusted my instincts to sniff out danger." Each image is a powerful, nervously energetic encounter that creates the picture of a strange and singular street scene. A first selection of these photographs was published in GO in 2000 and for this new book, twenty years later, Bruce Gilden has delved into his archives. With the benefit of hindsight, he has extracted some thirty unpublished images from these hallucinated stays in search of personalities as strong as his own. In this way, he transcribes his vision of Japan. As an introduction, the photographer also makes us relive his peregrinations through several anecdotes and stories.

In 2019, François Prost goes on a trip across America. Instead of visiting national parks or exploring big cities, he preferred to take his camera on the trail of strip clubs, from Miami to Los Angeles, in broad daylight. The resulting series, Gentlemen's Club, examines American culture and urbanism in the same breath. Taken from a medium distance, these 200 photographs highlight the stark geometry of American roadside architecture as well as dominant views of gender and sexuality. This work is a continuation of the After Party series, which compiles hundreds of images of nightclub facades in daylight across France. Many thought at the time that these images had been made in the USA (most of these nightclubs draw their architectural and stylistic references from post-war American pop culture). So it was quite natural that the photographer turned to the United States to continue this work.

Curator Tina Bloch has invited 34 European architects to rediscover the gestures of the sand castle builders. On the beaches of Deauville and Benerville, astonishing monuments have risen between sky and sea, mandalas and labyrinths as far as the eye can see have had a fleeting but intense existence. Both land art and sand painting, the proposals, maturely elaborated or improvised according to the inspiration of the moment, are of an amazing diversity. Digging, building, sculpting, molding, scarifying, raking, drawing, modeling... sand lends itself to all poetic inventions. Between two tides, the photographer Michel Denancé has captured their ephemeral beauty, mixing eye-level perspectives and aerial views for a result of great aesthetic strength. THE PHOTOGRAPHER Trained as an architect, Michel Denancé takes more pleasure in observing the work of others than in producing it himself. His reports simultaneously highlight the building itself (both a volume defined by its walls and a living space installed in a site) and the architects' intentions. His photographs appear in the specialized press, sometimes in generalist publications, and accompany monographs of architects (Renzo Piano, in particular), books devoted to a building or thematic reviews. The photographs executed outside of the commissioned work also concern the landscape or the city and are sometimes the subject of books: Dogon Doumbo Doumbo (a micro-territory of the Dogon country), Mille milliards de milieux (landscapes of Seine-Saint-Denis), Un si parfait jardin (Algiers), Petites Agonies urbaines (walled facades in the Paris region), all accompanied by texts by writers and published by Bec en l'air. Tina Bloch is a curator, at the initiative in 2016 of the Archisable project which was the subject of a first book (Éd. Xavier Barral, 2018).