Seminar - Photographs, Texts, Archives: Potential Archives

While photography—freed from its status as a document—was long cultivated in the form of a painting, it now tends to return to its original modesty: souvenir photos, administrative documents, family albums, catalogs of gestures, medical imagery, and archives. 

By exploring this economy of instrumental images, the artists allow the photographs to speak a language of intimate, discreet experience, closely tied to real-life situations. The relationship to the written word thus takes on forms that literature has described as documentary—forms that nonetheless convey narratives, imaginations, and dreams. In the interplay between photography, text, and the archive, a poetics of the document is reenacted. Yet at the same time, it transcends the forms of photo-text to encompass performance, installation, and investigation.

As was the case last year, this year’s seminar will be part of the Lille Institut pour la photographie’s program to support research and artistic creation. Among other guests, we will welcome several recipients of this program’s grants. The aim will be to facilitate a dialogue between a researcher and an artist on themes related to the interplay between photography, text, and the archive.

Potential Archives , Thursday, December 14, at the Mûrier lecture hall, featuring:

↘︎ Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques : Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques (1983) is a transdisciplinary artist whose work lies at the intersection of documentary photography, video installation, and complex technological systems. His work has been exhibited internationally and has received several prestigious awards—at Le BAL (Young Talents Award, 2013), at C/O Berlin (Talent Award, 2019), and at the Aperture Foundation in New York (2016).   In 2015, he was the first recipient of the Hermès Corporate Foundation’s Immersion Prize for the project *Eden*, set in a town in North Carolina where he purchased a subprime mortgage home for $1,000. Between 2017 and 2018, he was a resident at the Casa de Velázquez—Académie de France in Madrid to create the audiovisual installation *Sub Rosa*, centered around a 12-hour video. He has been a doctoral student at AMU-ENSP since 2023 and is the recipient of a research fellowship at the Institut pour la photographie (Lille). Two books have been published on his work: Eden (1,000 pages, 2016) by Aperture (New York) and Sub Rosa (144 pages, 2019) by Spector Books (Leipzig).

↘︎ Alice Leroy: Alice Leroy is an associate professor of visual and film studies at Gustave Eiffel University. Her work focuses on the relationship between science and aesthetics through visual representations of the body, with a particular emphasis on methods for mediating the invisible (phantasmagoria, X-rays, thermography…) and the images and narratives of non-human worlds, straddling the line between science and fiction. She also curates film programs for the Cinéma du Réel International Documentary Film Festival at the Centre Pompidou and the Franska Film Festival in Stockholm, and writes film criticism as a member of the editorial board of the  Cahiers du cinéma .

List of sessions for the seminar:

Thursday, October 5: Arno Gisinger and Georges Didi-Huberman - Moving, Seeing

Thursday, October 19: Christian Joschke - Photo & Text: The Story of a Genre

Thursday, November 2: Nina Ferre-Gleize and Marielle Macé - Practices of the Essay

Thursday, November 16: Doriane Molay and Rachael Woodson - An Investigation into Sorority Life

Thursday, November 30: Agnès Geoffray, Vanessa Desclaux, and Philippe Artières - Archives of the Body