Images Plurielles

Through conceptual photographs, Mahmoud Alkurd shares his own vision of the catastrophe suffered by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during Israel's 2014 Protective Edge attack. Writer Mo'men Ashour's highly realistic narratives, drawn from real events, bring the consistency of traumatic experience to these poetic images. Today, the geopolitical and humanitarian situation has not changed.

Their names are Rylee, Donovan, Gracie, Catalyan, Lily, Michael... they are between 3 and 17 years old and live in Texas, Idaho, Louisiana, New York... These children and teenagers posed in front of photographer Laurent Elie Badessi's camera with a gun in their hands and all answered clearly to this very simple question: "What do you like about guns? While the aim of this photographic work is to explore the obvious attraction of guns for a large proportion of Americans, this book also invites us to face this social, political and moral reality.

Athens and its islands, we could also say Athens and its daughters. We can see the Ariadne's thread between them, and the thousand-year-old connection with the Capital, the mother country. All Greeks, including those who have gone far away, have a favourite island. To meet them, I just had to let myself be carried by the waves and let the years go by. Happy who like Ulysses...

The photos you will discover in this book are the result of three years of travels in the city of Algiers. The photographer decided to use the polaroid photographic technique. It is a singular approach to offer his photograph to the person portrayed, in order to preserve the negative, as a backdrop, altered, immemorial, a revelation of the realization of this work.

The Doukhobors appeared three centuries ago in Russia as a pacifist community that rejected the Church's liturgy and opposed all civil government. Their history was thus one of persecution, deprivation of freedom and deportation. Despite the difficult conditions imposed on them, they remained faithful to their convictions: exiled from Crimea to Georgia, they founded several villages in the Javakheti region. But to escape reprisals, a large part of the community chose to leave for Canada at the beginning of the 20th century, supported by Tolstoy and his supporters.

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.