Seminar - Photographs, Texts, Archives: Practices of the Essay

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.

Essay Writing Workshop, Thursday, November 2, in the Mûrier Lecture Hall, featuring:

↘︎ Nina Ferrer-Gleize: Nina Ferrer-Gleize is a photographer, author, and publisher. Her book Agriculture as Writing was published in 2023 by GwinZegal. Her first solo exhibitions were held at Le Bleu du Ciel (Lyon, 2021) and at the GwinZegal Art Center (Guingamp, 2023). She holds a Ph. D. In Creative Arts (ENSP, AMU, 2021), a master’s degree in Literature and the Arts (Paris Cité, 2015); a DNSEP (HEAR-Strasbourg, 2013), and a degree from ESAL-Épinal (2011). Nina  Ferrer-Gleize co-founded Pétrole éditions in 2013. Since  September 2022, she has been teaching at ISBA Besançon.

↘︎ Marielle Macé: Marielle Macé is a writer and researcher (CNRS-EHESS) and a former resident of the Villa Medici. Her books (essays and poems) explore contemporary ways of life, as well as the anger and hope that drive them. Among her publications are:  Styles: A Critique of Our Ways of Life  (Gallimard, 2016),  To astonish, to contemplate. Migrants in France  (Verdier, 2017),  Our cabins  (Verdier, 2019),  A Rain of Birds  (José Corti, 2022, SGDL Nonfiction Grand Prize),  Breathe  (Verdier, 2023)

List of sessions for the seminar:

Thursday, October 5: Arno Gisinger and Georges Didi-Huberman - Moving to See
Thursday, October 19: Christian Joschke — Photography & Text: The Story of a Genre
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
Thursday, December 14: Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques and Alice Leroy - Potential Archives