Travels around the globe | The Gazette Nord-Pas de Calais
Back to America
This surprising book takes us to a fantasy America through 200 photographs, taken between 1936 and 1943, from the Library of Congress and superbly colored by Sébastien de Oliveira. Gas stations and diners, rodeos, stadiums and high school hallways, gleaming cars and Hollywood glamour… The America presented in this book no longer exists, and never even existed. It is the cross product of the imagination of Sébastien de Oliveira and the gaze of photographers from the Far Security Administration responsible for documenting the actions of the American government in the 1930s and 1940s. To (re)live his vision of America from this period between greatness and decadence, Sébastien de Oliveira got down to the work of a goldsmith by recolouring these photographs by hand. A bewitching dive into an America of fiction, dreams and cinema.
Back to America by Sébastien de Oliveira (Editions du Chêne).
Run after the rain
This magnificent book brings together the photographs of Magali Koenig taken between 1988 and 2017 during thirteen trips to Russia. Seduced by the discovery of Moscow and the spirit of the Russian people, the Swiss photographer sets off in the footsteps of Anton Chekhov or in search of a setting by the immense filmmaker Andrei Tarkovski, soaking up the beauty of the place, cradled by the slowness of the old tankers that sail on the Lena. She embarked at Oust-Kout and descended the river to Yakutsk. From her travels, she brings back images that evoke the beauty of almost nothing, the wait before the party, the memory of a meeting. Echoing this, the writer Blaise Hofmann illustrates in twenty-five poems a trip to Russia made in 2002. His words dialogue with the photographs of Magali Koenig, restoring the strange feeling felt when one finds oneself alone at the other end of the world, but also the many surprises in contact with another culture. Or two ways of traveling in the immensity of Russia.
Run after the rain. Photographs by Magali Koenig. Poems by Blaise Hofmann (Editions Actes Sud).
Cuba
“Music is the movement of memory and the memory of movement“, the “second light of cubawrites Philippe Lançon in the preface to this rich book with neat graphics. Which tells for the first time the extraordinary story of this island in the heart of the Caribbean, from the unique angle of music and literature. On the musical side, Cuba is a concentrate of geographical and cultural influences, where Chano Pozo meets Cab Calloway, Omara Portuondo meets Joséphine Baker, without forgetting the hybrid and intoxicating styles that are the habanera, the contradanza, the mambo, the cha- cha-cha, or the son. More surprisingly, only a few lines are devoted to the Buena Vista Social Club album, which introduced Cuban music to the world in 1996. Born from the adaptation of the France Musique series Crossroads of the Americas, this book embraces a period that goes from the 18th century to the present day and reveals an island that was for a long time at the crossroads of the world, a privileged meeting point between Europe and the Americas. Thus, in the 1930s, the Cuban writer Lezama Lima welcomed the Spanish poet María Zambrano with these words:You are here in the reunion, in the coincidence and in the islands. You are on the way to Caribbean illuminations where everything is resolved in light…”.
Cuba. A history of the island through its music and literature by Marcel Quillévéré. Preface by Philippe Lançon (Editions Albin Michel).