Brodbeck & de Barbuat

Une Histoire parallèle (A parallel History) is a large corpus of 232 images recreating an imaginary History of photography through a machine learning programme generating images from textual data. The project questions appropriation in the age of the internet and the emergence of creative tools based on artificial intelligence and their impact on photography and its ability to translate reality and make history, underlining the need to constantly rethink our relationship to images and new technologies.

Etude d’après Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993 - 2022

(L) Etude d’après Edward Weston, Nude, Charis, Santa Monica, 1936 - 2022
(R) Etude I d’après Andres Serrano, Immersion, 1987 - 2022

Etude d’après Bernd and Hilla Becher, Hannover Mine1/2/5, Bochum-Hordel, Ruhr Region, Germany, 1973 - 2022

Etude d’après Helmut Newton, Bergström at the University of Miami pool, Florida, 1978 - 2022

(L) Etude d’après George Hoyningen-Huene, The divers, 1930 - 2022
(R) Etude d’après Irving Penn, Cigarette n°37, New York, 1972 - 2022

Etude d’après Man Ray, Tears, 1930 - 2022

Etude d’après Jeff Wall, Milk, 1984 - 2022

(L) Etude d’après James Nasmyth, Back of Hand, 1874 - 2022
(R) Etude d’après Andreas Gursky, Kuwait Stock Exchange I, 2007 - 2022

Etude d’après Harold Edgerton, Bullet Piercing an Apple, 1964 - 2022

Etude d’après Martin Parr, The artificial beach inside the Ocean Dome, Miyazaki, Japan, 1996 - 2022

(L) Etude d’après Marc Riboud, The Painter of the Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1953 - 2022
(R) Etude I d’après Harold Edgerton, Milk Drop Coronet, 1957 - 2022

Etude d’après Charles Marville, Place Saint André-des-Arts. Paris. circa 1866 - 2022

Etude d’après Joel Sternfeld, After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California, July 1979 - 2022

Etude d’après Weegee, Their First Murder, 1938 - 2022

(L) Etude d’après Taryn Simon, Memorandum of Understanding between the Royal Government of Cambodia and the Government of Australia Relating to the Settlement of Refugees in Cambodia. Ministry of Interior, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 2014 - 2022
(R) Etude d’après Diane Arbus, Untitled (49), New Jersey, 1970 - 2022

Etude d’après Robert Capa, The falling soldier, Cerro Muriano, 1936 - 2022

Etude d’après Sam Shere, Explosion of the Hindenburg, Lakehurst, New Jersey, May 6, 1937 - 2022

Etude d’après Diane Arbus, Untitled (49), New Jersey, 1970 - 2022

Etude d’après Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993 - 2022

Etude d’après Robert Doisneau, Les Enfants de la Place Hébert, 1957 - 2022

Etude d’après Brassaï, Two Lovers in a Paris Café, Place d’Italie, 1932 - 2022

Etude d’après Martin Parr, People queue for tea and hot dogs, New Brighton, England, GB, 1985 - 2022

Etude d’après Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol and members of The Factory, New York 1969 - 2022

Etude d’après Guy Bourdin, Charles Jourdan, Autumn 1977 - 2022

Etude d’après Garry Winogrand, New York, 1969 - 2022

Etude d’après Lewis Hine, Breaker Boys In Coal Chute, South Pittston, Pennsylvania, 1911 - 2022

Etude d’après Horst P. Horst, Hands, Hands, Hands, 1941 - 2022

Etude d’après Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907 - 2022

Etude d’après Georges Mérillon, Funeral Vigil For Nasimi Elshani, Kosovo, January 1990 - 2022

Etude d’après Edward Weston, Nude, Charis, Santa Monica, 1936 - 2022

Etude d’après Rineke Dijkstra, Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 26, 1992 - 2022

Etude d’après Marc Riboud, The Painter of the Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1953 - 2022

Etude d’après Stephen Shore, Broad Street, Regina, Saskatchewan, August 17, 1974 - 2022

Etude d’après W. Eugene Smith, Spanish wake, Deleitosa, Spain, 1951 - 2022

Etude d’après Walker Evans, Floyd Burroughs, A Cotton Sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama, 1936 - 2022

Etude d’après Yevgeny Khaldei, Raising a Flag over the Reichstag, 1945 - 2022

Les 1000 vies d’Isis highlights an imaginary character, created by computer. A virtual identity whose daily life we come to narrate, staging the invented feelings of a woman, sort of muse of the digital age, whom we discover in a disturbing hybrid humanity. In parallel to these classical-looking photographs, smaller composite images evoke the process of Isis' birth at the heart of the machine. The project thus questions our own humanity, what connects us to the living and our link with reality and it’s representation.

The project was born in 2020 during the period of containment of the Covid-19 pandemic with the support of the Jeu de Paume museum and the Cnap. The complete project entered the French national collections in 2022.

CHAPTER I

Inspired by Native American beliefs, Images of Light and dancing spirits is a project exploring the photographic medium and the boundary of images. In the form of separate chapters, it sets up an experimental corpus that explores different ways in which photography captures, transcribes or transforms reality.

In this first chapter we wanted to record the world around us directly on a digital sensor. The camera captures the environment in the form of light impressions. Forms appear that are imperceptible to the naked eye, evoking the presence of souls surrounding us in our everyday life echoing Amerindian beliefs that the souls of the deceased continue to float among us.

CHAPTER II

During our residency at the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici, we undertook a journey to Ecuador in order to get in touch with a community in the Amazon Forest, the Achuar. During our encounters with the people and the forest, we collected a set of everyday elements: ashes, earth, water, stones, sand and soil fragments, leaves, tree bark, feathers, fabric and food. These elements, like a poetic archaeology of everyday life, were placed on small glass plates where we searched for the presence or traces of spirits and souls. For the native populations of the Amazon, all the elements of the living and the non-living (animals, plants or minerals) share with us a same interiority. By doing so, we wanted to question our relationship to the world and the spiritual, and divert photography in an attempt to capture the invisible.

CHAPTER III

In this third chapter, also made during our journey to the Jivaros in the Amazon, we collected ashes from burnt trees. These ashes were placed on black sheets of paper that we came to re-photograph giving birth to invented starry skies. Echoing the deforestation of the Amazon, these images are inspired by an Inuit belief that interprets the aurora borealis as the dance of the spirits in the sky.

In search of Eternity takes the form of a visual journey inspired by a Native American belief that the spirit of the dead would continue to float among us. Thus appear another perception of time and reality, allowing the camera to plunge into the souls as a spirit in the midst of men. The project is divided in separate chapters produced over the years.

CHAPTER III

In search of Eternity III takes place in India in the Maharashtra region, and puts into light a symbolic tale of the quest for oneself. This chapter is divided into three 14-minutes video cycles, in which the birds guide the camera and the viewer through a suspended world and time. In the Mahâbhârata, Sanskrit epic of the Hindu mythology and sacred book of India, the raven is associated with the messengers of death and represents a guide of souls in their final journey.

Video extract - In search of Eternity III

Villa Médicis, Académie de France à Rome, 2017 - exhibition views

CHAPTER II

In search of Eternity II takes place in Japan and stages a symbolic tale reflecting the birth of life on Earth. The soundscape of the video installation, created as a tribute to Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Der Himmel über Berlin, is divided into five parts. Two voices, those of two angels, recount their memories: they evoke love, the birth of life, Man, war. In the final part, a man whose soul begins the journey to the afterlife remembers his memories of life on earth.

Video extract - In search of Eternity II
With sound excerpts from Der Himmel über Berlin by Wim Wenders and music by Jürgen Knieper.
Courtesy of the Wim Wenders Stiftung and Jürgen Knieper.

Galerie Papillon, Paris 2019 - exhibition view

Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles, 2017 - exhibition view

CHAPTER I

In search of Eternity I focuses on the northern parts of the city of Paris. Geographical areas where communities from the Maghreb and West Africa have settled for several generations. Neighborhoods under pressure from fast economic, urban and social transformations, destined to disappear as we know them today. The camera plays the role of witness and recorder, trapping in time an image and a living history of the city.

Video extract - In search of Eternity I

This series of large-format images, photographed from 2008 to 2011, finds its origins in the beginnings of Photography, when Louis Daguerre’s 1838 Boulevard du Temple photograph showed an apparently empty street where only a shoeshine was visible. The exposure time of several hours allowed only immobile elements to appear on the photograph. Using contemporary techniques to emulate this process with modern cameras, we captured famous places around the world and transposed them into an inner and silent representation. Human activity disappears bringing together two periods in the history of photography, and evoking the link between our existence on earth and afterlife.
This series would find renewed resonance eleven years later during the Covid-19 period.

Video extract - Place de l'Opéra, Paris 2009

Landscapes, deserted cityscapes and theatrical decors blend together to form a timeless world. Photographic prints altered by the random and accidental light of the sun seem to transform human presences into apparitions. Souls are revealed here and there in a universe that takes the form of a daydream. The mineral and the vegetal operate an inversion and everyday objects seem to reveal the hidden souls of the photographed places.
These scenes, photographed between 2008 and 2011 during the elaboration of our Silent World series, were solarised in the darkroom during the Covid-19 containment period in 2020.

Living Images looks at the cycle of life through filmed portraits and landscapes looped in an infinite movement. In 2009, we realized the portrait of Lucie’s grandmother in her last days. During that day, she evoked memories she wanted to take with her to the afterlife. In the two following years, we wanted to return to these places in order to enclose them in an image that could be both alive and eternal. Living images thus questions the nature of images exploring the areas of encounter between still and moving images. Thus treating of the ineffable border between reality and the universe of dreams, and this invisible thread connecting us to the world of the dead.

Video extract

Scènes de vie reveals from the height of a ceiling a moment of simple and daily life. The view from above undermines this banality by depicting these fragments of life in a pictorial way. The living become recumbents, the beds become drawings, spaces become plans, life a geometry and an enigma. Inspired by stories of imminent death, where the soul escapes from the body to begin a journey to the afterlife, this point of view questions the representation of images. Overwhelming the notions of perspective and depth of field intimately linked to photography, it causes the viewer to lose his usual reading landmarks, transforming volumes into surfaces.

Les mondes perdus refers to works about discovering a new world outside of known space and time. The project reveals landscapes beyond the visible, landscapes that do not exist when faced with the naked eye. Only through photography and the slowness of its recording, the veiled colours of the night appear and reveal worlds hidden on the outskirts of our cities. Interior spaces recalling the myths of Atlantis and lost civilizations take shape on film. This imaginary vision of Landscape and Photography itself would guide our research on Man, his daily life and his environment since these early works.

Over the years, we create a body of work made of video and sound installations inspired by the History of cinema. Extracts are taken and placed in new specific environments like visual ready-mades questioning the place of man, his relationship to the afterlife and the spiritual.

RESTER ESPRIT !
In this sound installation, two angels evoke their existence as spirits and dream of abolishing their eternity. The translation of the German poem by Peter Handke is projected onto the stone.

Sound extract - Rester esprit !

QUAND PASSENT LES CIGOGNES
A video projection on the wall shows a woman reading a letter from her lover at war. While discovering the letter, she does not yet know that he has just died on the battlefield, making it a dialogue between the world of the living and the afterlife.

Video extract - Quand passent les cigognes

LES NIOBIDES
The Niobids, a sculpture representing the massacre of the children of Niobe, are frozen in the movement of their last breath. The fragile glow of candles scattered across the floor makes these statues vibrate in an almost imperceptible movement in the middle of the night.

CHARULATA
A woman battered by her own feelings silently sings while swaying.

Video extract - Charulata