Elegia Fantastica

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Hemeria

In 2018, the VII Foundation asked more than a dozen renowned reporters and photojournalists to revisit countries with which they had become achingly familiar during times of brutal conflict. The task was to see peace through the prism of their journalistic experience; to survey familiar towns and villages; to reconnect with women, men, soldiers, civilians, statesmen, and students who had survived the conflict or grown up in the postwar society; to discover what the lived experience of peace feels like. To augment this reportage, the VII Foundation sought input from academics and peacemakers. And they invited citizens of those countries to give their very personal narratives, in their own voices. Hard edges were not softened nor unpalatable impressions deleted. They wanted to show the truth as seen and experienced by those that lived and those that reported on seemingly intractable civil wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina Cambodia, Colombia, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and Rwanda.The result is Imagine: Reflections on Peace - a curation of searing images and trenchant essays that show both micro and macro views of peace, with its uneven degrees of economic success, political stability, and social harmony. In this stunning collection, worldrenown journalists and authors take us into societies that have suffered searing conflict - and survived. Photographic essays make the stakes during war and peace grippingly palpable. Compelling backstories about negotiations, tales of survival, and accounts of the search for inner peace make the big picture personal. Imagine offers a rare glimpse into the unvarnished story of peace, a window into what it takes for societies and individuals to move forward after unspeakable brutality.

Imagine: Reflections on Peace

Power, Samantha

Knight, Gary

LOYD, Anthony

GOUREVITCH, Philip

Anderson, Jon Lee

FLETCHER, MARTIN

SWAIN, Jon

Peress, Gilles

WRIGHT, Robin

POWELL, Jonathan

Haviv, Ron

Ferry, Stephen

Picone, Jack

McCullin, Don.

The VII Foundation

Photography & Video

Product Description 
Follow the adventure…\n> What secrets is the Mediterranean Sea keeping from us? 
> What is its actual level of pollution? 
> Is it a dead or living sea? A sea that has been damaged or on the mend? 
> What treasures still await Man's discovery? 
> Because all these questions of current vital importance lie at the heart of environmental debates. 
> Because the Mediterranean Sea is more than just a large body of water, it's a small ocean with an oversized History. 
> Because the Gombessa V expedition is like none other, offering lots to be learned and filled with hope…\nMediterranean Planet forms a sequel to Laurent Ballesta's latest works: 
Secrets d’Océans (Oceans' Secrets), 
Adélie Terre & Mer (Adélie Earth & Sea) and 
700 requins dans la nuit (700 Sharks in the Dead of Night). It represents the accomplishment of his personal endeavors during the eponymous July 2019 expedition, while also providing closure to the more comprehensive effort underway in the Mediterranean. This publication is thus a compilation of the biologist-photographer's most spectacular shots from 2010 through the present day.\nAccompanied by minimal textual content, the photographs of rare creatures never before illustrated exhibiting unusual behavior tell the story with each page turned of natural history and lived history. From the extraordinary biodiversity of the coral reefs to the seascapes far beneath the surface, Laurent Ballesta has embarked on an excursion into these otherworldly ecosystems that actually exist on Earth and make up the Mediterranean Planet.\nThis book also conforms with the longstanding tradition of works that pay tribute to the marine world by offering unique insights into an ecosystem that has not yet unveiled all its secrets. After several deep-sea diving expeditions spanning the globe under the "Gombessa" flag, the Gombessa V "Mediterranean Planet" campaign is Laurent's last at the helm. A world first, this expedition meant Laurent Ballesta and three other divers would cohabitate for 28 days inside a 5-m2 pressurized module designed for both saturation diving and deep sport diving, from Marseille to Bandol, Carqueiranne to Saint-Tropez, Sainte-Maxime to Antibes, and finally from Antibes to Monaco. 
 About the Author 
Laurent Ballesta was the youngest photographer ever to receive the prestigious "Gold Diver" award at the International Festival of Underwater Images held in Antibes.\nIn 1999, he was named scientific advisor in marine settings for the TV series Ushuaia Nature, alongside the explorer and show host Nicolas Hulot. For 12 consecutive years, he made the most of his travels in expanding his compendium of deep-sea fauna from across the world.\nIn 2000, alongside Pierre Descamp, he founded the Eye of Andromeda Association, in the aim of reconciling oceanological studies with an artistic appreciation of the marine environment. This effort would lead in 2008 to the creation of a company, named Oceanological Andromeda.\nIn 2007, he shot the deepest photograph ever taken by a diver, at 190 m (623 ft) underwater off the coast of Nice.\nIn 2009, he organized a covert expedition to South Africa to realize a dream, namely diving with Gombessa (another name given to the area's coelacanth fish) and bringing back the very first photograph of the living fossil taken by a diver 120 m (393 ft) underwater. This mission would lead to the first Gombessa expedition, 4 years later, to carry out the initial scientific protocols on a living coelacanth specimen at a depth of 120 m (393 ft).\nSince then, Laurent Ballesta has led 4 Gombessa expeditions: The Grouper Mystery (2015), Antarctica, On the Footsteps of the Emperor (2017), and 700 Sharks in the Dead of Night (2018).\nIn 2017, "The Hidden Face of the Iceberg", ushered in History's first photographic series revealing an iceberg in its entirety, and earning him the prestigious "Wildlife Photographer of the Year" award in the category Earth Environments. Laurent Bal

Mediterranean Planet

How best to tell the life story of a fashion photographer? What was the common thread composing his career? How does his body of work and progression tie into the history of fashion photography?Regards spans 4 decades of the extraordinary professional career of a photographer whose discretion and elegance are reflected in this dedicated retrospective: a tribute to womanhood, to women in all their diversity, showcasing their timelessness, universality, sophistication, boldness, seductiveness, provocativeness and even at times their inaccessibility. A hymn exalting their beauty. This one-of-a-kind book, offering numerous iconic images, also delicately narrates how perception of this femininity has evolved over the years. But above all else, this book tells the story of a man's love for women, who have always left him fascinated, amazed, overwhelmed and inspired. This work is a confession of love for what women represent to him, a testimonial to how they move the photographer, who has never ceased to admire them with passion.

André Carrara, Regards

Le Mee, Isabelle-Cecile

Product Description Maryam Ashrafi is a social documentary photographer who believes in long term projects, she chooses to stay behind the front lines and observe the daily lives of combatants, which includes a lot of waiting around. She is above all involved in documenting the everyday life on the Kurdish front. Her work puts a face on a widely commented war which remains, from afar, perceived mainly by the West in terms of the number of refugees.Maryam documents the war in her own way, stressing its complexities and the actual building of a new social model based on equality where women occupy the same roles as men, which is remarkable in this area of the world. This is why, over the years, she has returned to the same places, from Kobane to Tabqa, to show the unique power of the resilience of the population and the will to live and change."The struggle of the Kurdish people and their fight for freedom and fundamental rights have not come to an end, and therefore this book cannot portray all of their journeys, nor shall I stop documenting what is still to come. Yet I believe, as a witness, I owe it to history and to those I have met for sharing some of these images in this book to show part of their journey to freedom and equality," Maryam believes.The book is built on the chronology of the events as documented by Maryam Ashrafi, to understand the evolution of the conflict and its consequences on the populations and their living environment. Photographer James Nachtwey once made a point about such war photographs shown in museums, or in a book; it is “a space for reflection on the universality of the dramas that humanity is going through in its entirety.”During her travels, Maryam Ashrafi has created a body of images which highlight very important topics as they are an immediate consequence of war, from the sheer destruction to the refugee camps, as they evoke the foundations of the culture and the identity of the Kurdish people - the ceremonies in honor of martyrs, dances around fires, New Year celebrations, etc.Finally, Maryam Ashrafi’s work is also about empathy and about invisible wounds; it is obvious that one could not witness a conflict without being caught up in the daily suffering, especially children and women.Maryam finds emotions and feelings, in simple gestures, smiles and dances, these moments of intimacy. The presence of the photographer is forgotten, there remains only the reality of their fight and the resilience of a people. In these moments, she captures expressions that speak so much more than long speeches. Let’s listen to them in the midst of ruins, dancing amid bullets. About the Author Born in Tehran in 1982 during the Iran-Iraq war, Maryam’s passion for sociology led her to focus her interest on social and political issues. After graduating with a BA in Social Documentary Photography from the University of Wales, Newport, UK, she began to explore these issues in different regions, with a particular focus on the situation of Kurds in Kurdistan. For several years, she has been working on various subjects including refugees in Paris and the mobilization of the Kurdish and Iranian diaspora. Above all, as an independent freelance photographer, she covered the aftermath of the war in Northern Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan, notably in Kobane and Sinjar during numerous visits until 2018. Her work on Kurdistan has been the subject of several collective and solo exhibitions and publications including the Guardian. Her long-term work on Kurdish issues has also led her to work as a camerawoman for documentaries such as I Am The Revolution (2018) and to direct and shoot her upcoming documentary in Iraq and Syria.Allan Kaval is a journalist for the famous French newspaper Le Monde; he was their correspondent at Erbil. He received the Albert Londres prize at the end of 2020 for an article on Daesh prisoners held in Syria.Mylène Sauloy has documented the conflict in four different parts of Kurdistan, no

Rising Among Ruins, Dancing Amid Bullets

Mann, Carol

Kaval, Allan

Sauloy, Mylène

Matin, Kamran

The Sowers of Joy

By using an older form of technology, French artist Éric Antoine strips away modern-day conceits in the quest for simplicity, solitude, and core truths. The works speak to the passage of time but also to a sense of timelessness. Useful Lies brings together several series among the last he produced. Aside from a single cardboard box in Les Intrus--a series that highlights the human&nbsp;body and the fragility of shelter--nothing in the photographs dates them. And yet, his framing and cropping are entirely modern, subverting any suggestion of nostalgia. These are not attempts to replicate nineteenth-century photographs but rather forays into uncharted territory that use the past to draft new stories. The collodion process also helps visually convey the feeling of being caught between two forces: the drive toward perfection and the desire to embrace flaws. More specifically, Antoine is drawn both to German New Objectivity of the 1920s, with its rejection of Expressionism, and to the movement known as pictorialism. His medium dovetails with his interest in New Objectivity by allowing for great precision and very fine detail. At the same time, the process is highly pictorial in that the artist essentially paints the glass plate with a sensitive coating, which pools and drips and must be controlled. This tension between exactitude and imperfection opens up the works, creating scenes that are both true to nature and evocative of their own realities.

Useful Lies

Wat, Pierre

Product Description This book offers an incomparable spectacle, that of an intimate face-to-face with the animal, here treated as a subject in its own right, on an equal footing with man, and it encourages us to take the time to contemplate it, to better question our relationship to the wild world and our place in it. And if the photographer has long since chosen black and white, it is to better play with the incomparable light of Africa, its singular purity that gives the feeling of being in direct contact with the material, without filter.Laurent Baheux's approach is not that of a naturalist or ethology-loving photographer, he does not seek to describe behavior or to unravel the mystery of a sensitive area of the animal that has remained unknown until now.What he finds with African elephants is the feeling of a rediscovered plenitude, of wonder at the world, of a rebirth, of a reconnection with the living. Far from the crowds and the urban world, it is in the heart of African national parks that he experiences the deep meaning of life, and that he offers himself the luxury of slowness, essential when he is 'is about letting the animal approach. The elephant obliges man to humility. We are nothing compared to his power and his intelligence. It is he who decides on the meeting, or, on the contrary, who imposes his distance. We are only “tolerated guests”, as Laurent Baheux reminds us.The elephant is not a predator and it is man who threatens its existence today, competing with it for the control of a territory which is shrinking more and more every day. The pressure of human activities, the demographic growth are the dangers which endanger its survival.As an extension of his militant commitment and his anti-speciesist discourse which seeks to break down the psychological barriers linked to the categorization of animals - wild, farmed, domesticated - according to their degree of utility or their “nuisance” power, Laurent Baheux provides new proof of the need to save elephants and protect their environment, not just because they populate our collective subconscious, from illustrated children's books to the travel stories of early explorers, but because they are closely linked to the balance of our planet and that they refer us, like mirrors, to our own finitude, ineluctable, we who resemble them so much, so strong and so fragile at the same time.“Courage is the reverse, the armed arm of wonder. [...] Where many, cynical or disillusioned have retreated, [Laurent Baheux] has this power to rely on the beauty of things, to believe in it and to be enraged at seeing it mistreated. He has that faith." About the Author For nearly 20 years, Laurent Baheux has observed the upheavals of the wild world through his lens - a vocation which came to him “in reaction to the madness of men”. Born in 1970, in Poitiers, he made his debut as an autodidact in the early 1990s, during the time of film, as a photographer in the regional sports press. To find a place in the profession, he moved to Paris, where he worked for major photo agencies and media specializing in international sports news.In 2002, tired of city life and bored of the hectic pace of the sporting events calendar, he turned to Africa and the wildlife of large land mammals. In 2007, after 5 years of shooting in the savannah, he began to show his snapshots of wildlife captured on the spot, instinctively, at random from his encounters with animals. In 2009, he published his first work based on his African work: "Terre des Lions" then "D’ivoire & d´ébène" in 2011.In 2013, he became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Environment Program and participated in the Wild & Precious anti-poaching campaign. Since then, he has campaigned for the respect of living things and natural habitats, against captivity and animal exploitation and actively supports several organizations for the protection of animals and wild lands.Praised for their aesthetic strength and authenticity,

Elephant

There is a world that remains unknown to most, it is that of the high mountains. A few seasoned climbers have access to it, but some do not associate this dizzying passion with a practice of artistic photography. Very close to us, it was enough for a young native of the Belgian flat country to meet the summits of the Swiss Alps and the Mont-Blanc Massif to decide to devote his life to it. Today, more than 10 years after a first initiatory hike in Valais and then discovering the Matterhorn, he devotes himself body and soul to one thing: seeing and photographing the Alps.\nIf nothing predisposed Thomas Crauwels to become both a photographer and a mountaineer, with ABOVE, his first book, he proves that he has today become one of the only photographers to be able to offer such images of summits all located more than 4000 meters above sea level. Thanks to him, we have access to extraordinary landscapes.\nHis black and white approach, his mastery of contrasts and lights, and a maturity acquired through his explorations allow him to sublimate the mountain without ever freezing it in a stereotypical representation. Each of his images is the result of a decisive moment, carefully thought out and elaborated, whether it concerns the organization of his expeditions or the mental construction of the images to be created.\nCartographic studies, choice of the right weather window, and formal research geared towards the quest for purity are at the service of a double desire: both to restore an emotion and to preserve the magic of a fleeting moment. ABOVE is therefore not a mountain book like any other. Above all, he tells the story of a photographer’s consuming passion for a massif whose sumptuous beauty he has captured. \nThe repetition of black and white images underlines the fascination exerted on the photographer by the vertigo of a summit, the pure line of a ridge, the white light of a hanging glacier, the harmony of a peak, the slope of a precipice, the verticality of a wall. Throughout the chapters, the photographer becomes the messenger of a contemplation where aesthetics are combined if not with the mystic, at least with his quest. In a slow process of idealization, the mountain takes on all the finery of a true sacred figure, appearing and then disappearing.\nThomas Crauwels is in this respect a worthy heir to the French romantic writers who discovered the mountain landscape towards the end of the 18th century at the same time that Horace-Benedict de Saussure inaugurated, in 1787, the conquest of the summits of the Alps for scientific reasons. The photographer followed in Rousseau’s footsteps and the mountains acted on him as the engine of his poetic imagination. Through his practice, he expresses the unalterable link between a wild, inaccessible nature and the strength of feelings and emotions that humans are able to experience and express. The mountain is unique in that it brings excitement to everyone. From the sublime to mysticism, the mountain is as much an aesthetic adventure as a physical experience. Photography, like mountaineering, is first of all a body in motion, a body in action.\nInaccessible land, ultimate territory of freedom? Inhuman earth? ABOVE proves to what extent geo-graphy and photo-graphy are closely intertwined when the mountain becomes the theater of their sacred union, territory of beauty, and of chaos to be overcome.\nThat the mountain is the privileged place for an experience of the sublime is only a return to etymology: what rises above us is sublime. In "contact with extremes", Thomas Crauwels knows he is faced with a quest for the impossible and the ideal.

Above

Paradise Inc.

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