RVB Books

The photographs that make up Tabitha Soren's book, Surface Tension are 20x25 room reproductions of her digital tablet screen. In the background, behind the fingerprints that cover the latter is a corpus of images from both her internet search history, the social networks she consults and the text messages she receives. Pictures of forest fires, protests, police repression, pictures that constitute the news and that we consult daily and often in a mechanical way. His artistic gesture highlights the constant interaction we have with our phone and evokes the collective reality of millions of humans constantly attracted by their screens and who, by dint of receiving an incessant flow of information in constant renewal, gradually forget that they also participate in the world physically and collectively. Surface Tension will be exhibited at Mills College Art Museum (September 2021 - December 2021), Pier 24 Photography (January 2022 - September 2022), and San Francisco Airport (October 2021 - April 2022). Soren has been a multidisciplinary visual artist for over 25 years, long interested in the intersection of culture, politics, the body, and psychology. She lives and works in California, and her work has been included in numerous private collections around the world (including museum collections such as LAC MA, The Getty, Harvard Art Museum, New Orleans Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Eastman Museum of Photography, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Pier 24). The book is accompanied by an essay written by Jia Tolentino, a writer for The New Yorker and author of the collection of essays entitled "Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion."

In their series of images "Paparazzi", the artist duo Mazaccio and Drowilal use and misappropriate images from these image-hunting photographers, and establish a typology of celebrity behavior. "The Beach", "Bike Riding", "Surfing", their titles are more than explicit. If these representations tend to show that they lead a "normal" life (they shop at the supermarket, walk their dog), they nevertheless display the codes that mark their belonging to a class apart (sumptuous villas, heavenly beaches, etc.). Their activities come to be sponsored by brands that see this as a relevant product placement in view of the affects involved. By decontextualizing these models and by working on their accumulation, the artists neutralize the sensational charge inherent in their representation and expose the ideology and the model of society which hide behind this epiphenomenon. Defying the good taste, refuting any hierarchy between the noble image and the vernacular cliché, they operate detour, confrontations, juxtapositions, and by doing so, they deconstruct, the air of nothing, the representations which shape our contemporary imaginary.

Discovered in France in 1994 in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, the Chauvet cave is one of the major sites in the History of Humanity, as much for the technical and aesthetic qualities of its cave paintings as for the paleontological pieces present there. It is one of the oldest decorated caves in the world. Forbidden to the general public, it has always been an object of fascination for Man, marking a major turning point in cave art and the history of early man. Diving into the heart of this unique Paleolithic site involved a major artistic challenge for Philippe Durand. To understand the cave is to start from a closed universe, a quantifiable set of signs and a spectacular natural architecture, where time seems to have stopped. Philippe Durand has voluntarily moved away from objective representations to reveal a more intimate, more subjective cave. For this, he uses the technique of multiple exposures to which he associates color filters. Thus he defined a space of creation, of non-objective representation, in which each one can project himself differently. The color is no longer treated in its realistic dimension, it refers rather to an information, to a code, as in astronomical or microscopic photographs. He rediscovers the initial idea of a dreamed, fantasized cave, and takes us on a psychedelic exploration of the most famous site in prehistory. Philippe Durand is the winner of the 2nd edition of the photography contest initiated by the Association pour le Rayonnement de la Grotte Chauvet - Pontd'Arc. The awarding of this prize allowed him to go to the heart of the cave to carry out his photographic project, which led to the publication of the book "Chauvet, l'aventure intérieure" published by RVB Books.

Dominique is the most common mixed name in France, and the twenty-seventh most common. Combining it with Lambert, the twenty-seventh most common surname, Stéphanie Solinas defined as her study population the one hundred and ninety-one Dominique Lambert listed in the private individuals' directory (Pages Blanches, France). She asked each of them by mail to fill out a Chinese portrait. From this, for the Dominique Lambert who responded, she elaborated a written portrait, with the help of the Advisory Committee for the Description of the Dominique Lambert (composed of a psychologist, a statistician, a police inspector, and a lawyer). This text formed the basis for the portrait drawn by the painter Benoît Bonnemaison-Fitte. The drawn portrait was then transformed into a sketch by Dominique Ledée, a police investigator from the Identité Judiciaire. Stéphanie Solinas then looked for a model with an obvious resemblance to the composite portrait to photograph. Slipped into the book jacket, a crystal pocket contains the identity photos of the "real" Dominique Lambert, author of the Chinese portraits, and thus closes the chain of representations imagined by the artist.

Erwin Wurm Photographs is published on the occasion of the first retrospective devoted by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie to his photographic practice. The book sheds light on the work of Erwin Wurm, an internationally renowned artist, from this new perspective. Bringing together some 600 photographs taken since the late 1980s, this comprehensive publication will also present original contact sheets and prints from the artist's personal archives, which have never before been made public. The book explores the artistic process by which the Austrian artist created such major works as the Dust Sculptures, Fabio Getting Dressed, and the famous One-Minute Sculptures, as well as recent large-format Polaroids. This monograph highlights the unique role played by the photographic medium in Wurm's work: far more than a means of immortalizing his performances, photography is for him a form of "sculptural" expression in its own right. Erwin Wurm was born in 1954 in Austria. He lives and works between Vienna and Limberg.

From the diversity of his influences, Hassan Hajjaj, Anglo-Moroccan artist, has created a form of artistic crossbreeding, a whimsical and eccentric universe that engages in a dialogue between tradition and modernity, culture and pop culture. Known for his ultra-colored portraits at the border between documentary practice and fashion photography, he also associates in his compositions African loincloths, cans, logos or monograms diverted. He thus elaborates a kind of visual reappropriation of globalized consumer products and proposes a critical interpretation of oriental exoticism. Simply titled Hassan Hajjaj, this book published on the occasion of the retrospective that the MEP is devoting to him in September 2019, is the first major monograph devoted to his work. It includes all of the series that have made him famous as well as his previously unpublished B/W work.

Tiane Doan na Champassak discovered on the Web Noname Jane, an American pornographic actress who ended her career after having participated in more than 300 films. In 2007 she announced, via her website, the sale of all the sex toys she used for her photo shoots and films. Continuing his practice of appropriation Champassak gathers in this book the complete collection of sex toys accompanied by the comments of the actress. He then learned directly from Noname Jane that the entire collection had been destroyed in a fire. As a result, the actress closed down her site permanently.

Following in the footsteps of Cindy Sherman, Tomoko Sawada embodies the second generation of female artists who choose the photographic mise-en-scène to explore the question of identity and denounce contemporary cultural conventions. This young Japanese artist is particularly interested in the photographic practice within our society such as class, wedding or fashion studio photography. She disguises herself as a multitude of characters to bring out the stereotypes of these customs and habits. With Recruit, Tomoko Sawada continues her work on self-portraiture in contemporary Japanese society. This time she explores the identity photographs that Japanese students take at the end of their studies, in order to look for a job. She has kept the established formal conventions (costume, posture, neutral facial expression), but to thwart them by introducing a subtle variation. From a strict photographic device, taking up the codes of the photo booth (a light always similar, an invariant framing, the same pose), she multiplies the images by playing on her hairstyle, her make-up, and the expression given to her face. She amazes by the difference she makes possible and visible on her face, and demonstrates the relative character of all appearance. Arranged in a grid in the book, the three portrait plates offer a global vision of their number, at the same time as they invite the eye to scroll from one face to another.

Gone Fishing tells, in the form of a collection of fictitious correspondences, the modern epic of a young man who prefers vacations with friends to his new responsibilities as a father. In the course of the letters, Thomas Mailaender paints an unflattering portrait of a teenage Ulysses more inspired by beer, big game fishing and ping-pong than by the joys of fatherhood. Each of the 19 letters collected here is illustrated with a portrait of the young father performing a feat of appalling banality to excuse his absence. These images are photomontages made by the artist from amateur photos collected on the internet.

Hotel Mermaid Club, Chris Rhodes' first book, is an ode to everyday life. The English photographer transforms reality to create a poetic and soothing universe full of melancholy. His sense of color and framing creates a very personal aesthetic of banality. Although the portrait in the traditional sense of the term does not appear, the book finds its humanity in the narrative, the occupied spaces and the everyday objects to which we no longer pay attention.