CETTE FIN DU MONDE NOUS AURA QUAND MÊME DONNÉ DE BEAUX COUCHERS DE SOLEIL
Julien Gester
THE END OF THE WORLD AT LEAST GAVE US SOME FINE SUNSETS Julien Gester, with contribution from Jakuta Alikavazovic Textes
Jakuta Alikavazovic
Actes Sud
21 × 30 cm 56 pages 48 color illustrations softback bilingual french/english edition october 2021 estimated retail price: 25 €
Before publishing his own, Julien Gester wrote extensively about images, including for a decade at the French daily Libération. His World Cut series was featured in the Nuit de l’année presentation at the Rencontres d’Arles annual summer photography festival in 2019. Cette fin du monde… is his first book.
O
ut of her encounter with Julien Gester was born this new fanzine- like series that showcases young and original talent emerging in the contemporary artistic landscape. “We’d spent all this time looking at the same things, but that didn’t mean that we’d seen the same things,” observes the novelist Jakuta Alikavazovic who, at Julien Gester’s request, has written two short texts to accompany (though not to describe or circumscribe) his photographs. The result is a strange underground evocation built on associations rather than structured around a precise geography, fixed subject or narrative thread. The photographs presented here are documentary and contemplative in character, taking in western and eastern Europe, Asia and Africa, and North and South Africa over the course of several years. Though each image is anchored in
a specific reality, the ensemble does not attempt to capture a particular land or period but rather a certain openness of the gaze in relation to the world and its ambiguities, paying special attention to light, color, unexpected encounters, archetypes and accidents. In keeping with its cryptic title, Cette fin du monde nous aura quand même donné de beaux couchers de soleil takes the form of enigmatic diptychs that convey the state of indecisiveness that links one captured instant with the next, suggesting a multitude of possible narrations and fictions. These are hinted at throughout the book but it is ultimately up to the reader to reconstruct or invent them. As if what presents itself as the real world were secretly haunted, destabilised by the imaginations of those who inhabit it or the unconscious minds of those observing it.
(© Julien Gester)
Jakuta Alikavazovic was born and works in Paris. and won the Goncourt Prize for best debut novel for Corps volatils (L’Olivier, 2007). Comme un ciel en nous was published by Stock in September 2021 in the “Ma nuit au musée” collection.
9 - arts > photography
