The model, dressed by the photographer with a large studio spotlight placed face down on the horizon-like trestle table could be taken for a figurine in the image. At the zenith the light shining down from a second spot underscores the edges of the armor-like, fake tutu. The picture, created by Grégoire Alexandre for the 2006 Hyères Festival International des Arts de la Mode, is part of a singular aesthetic approach, where rigor, fantasy, irony and beauty combine. The artist’s name evokes the alliance of a pope and a prince. Grégoire Alexandre would probably have been perfectly at ease in rising to their aesthetic expectations. As he is when dealing with the commissioned work he receives from the great names in today’s fashion.

Master in his studio, as others are in their atelier or study, the photographer, without resorting to digital artifice, invents the universe that models, draped in couture collections, will inhabit like characters out of tales. Grégoire Alexandre’s work is studied, deliberate, but below the surface of his elaborate installations of scaffolding, fake perspectives and real suspensions, cut-outs and smoke, we sense the artist’s jubilation in consummately honoring the commission rather than considering it just another job to be done. There’s a rush of reminiscences paying homage to the inspired geniuses of cubism, of Triadic Ballet choreographers, of surrealism, and no doubt also of comic books. Among the fortunes and misfortunes of commercial, fashion and advertizing photography, rare are the signatures capable of measuring up to the label or the logo of clients wise enough to allow the artist free rein. The advertizing campaigns barely over, Grégoire Alexandre’s visual creations join Sieff’s and Horst’s in the realm of pure art.

Hervé Le Goff

Grégoire Alexandre. Was it a car or a cat I saw? Rencontres d'Arles, Atelier de mécanique de la SNCF. Du mardi 8 juillet au dimanche 14 septembre 2008

The seemingly-bored man facing the lens is Ara Güler, Turkey’s most famous photographer. This picture is on page 129 of Frédéric Lecloux’s, “L’Usure du Monde”, the finished product of his long-term project to undertake the same odyssey as Nicolas Bouvier’s from 1953 to 1957. “L’Usage du Monde”, the story of his journey from Geneva to Japan, via Yugoslavia, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India & Ceylon, captivated two generations of readers - potential travelers or not.

Frédéric Lecloux’s ended his trip at the Khyber Pass, on the border between Pakistan & Afghanistan, at the spot where Nicolas Bouvier parted company with his companion Thierry Vernet. From the similarity in the two titles – separated by 45 years –emerges the gray line that Frédéric Lecloux conveys to his beautiful book. Behind the wheel of his Fiat Topolino, Nicolas Bouvier discovered a world as yet largely unrepresented photographically. Without following unwaveringly in Nicholas Bouvier’s footsteps and tire tracks, Lecloux measures the passage of time, the deterioration and leprosy of facades, the dereliction, the poverty, unrelieved by any form of globalization, their sadness accentuated by his use of color. The encounter with Ara Güler, to which chance lent a helping hand on an April day in 2005, is one among numerous others, local artists, anonymous workers or the unoccupied, chanced upon during his peregrinations. Improvised with the audacity and the embarrassment of a request that nothing justifies or prepares, the picture liberates its share of warmth within the walls of Galatasaray’s Kafe Ara where, as we learn, the photographer is a familiar figure.

Frédéric Lecloux doesn’t blow this undreamt-of encounter, this portrait, striking in its authenticity and its doubt, into a big story, simply a page in the journal of a voyage the old man wished safe and happy.

Hervé Le Goff

• Frédéric Lecloux. L'usure du monde. 240 pages 28,5x24 cm. Préface d'Eliane Bouvier, postface de Christian Caujolle. Relié dos toile, édition Le bec en l'air. 45 euros.

The only thing we’ll discover about Pola Baumfeld is where she was born, Ostrowiec, Poland, and the approximate date of her death in the early 1940s, also in Poland. Her portrait is among those taken by Rafael Goldchain, Canadian photographer born in Santiago, Chili of Jewish immigrant parents. There’s an air of family in these 21 faces of men and women of all ages, the Goldszajn family, the spelling changing to Goldchain with the move to North and South America. But the features are always Rafael Goldchain’s, who employed his own head to create all the others and assemble his Family Ground, recreating in virtual reality, a genealogy of family members strewn far and wide by the Diaspora or probably exterminated in the death camps, like Sarah Gitel Ryten Goldberg, Chaja Golda Precelman Ryten, Mojszes Precelman, Baruch Rubinsztajn, Mendel and Leizer Goldszajn, Hinda Goldszajn Liberman and Pola Baumfeld. This project was born right after Rafael Goldchain’s son, an attempted answer to the question the child would inevitably ask about his origins, his roots, about a story History had at best muddled, at worst erased. Goldchain used what he had, letters, sometimes real photos, often a name, a place or a date. His subterfuge, indebted to digital manipulations, is believable and intrigues by its homogeneity, as if the artist, following in the steps of Sander or Harcourt, had installed a studio where all these dead had come to sit and smile at the camera. Rafael Goldchain didn’t win the 2008 Arcimboldo Prize for which he’d submitted this series on-line and not through a nominator, but the jury remarked his work. His series did however inspire Princeton Architectural Press in New York who will publish this Fall a beautiful book entitled "I Am My Family".

Hervé Le Goff

• The work of Jean-François Rosier, recipient of the 2008 Arcimboldo Prize, will be exhibited from June 12 – 28, 2008 at the gallery Cosmos, 56, boulevard de La Tour Maubourg, 75007 Paris.

• Rafael Goldchain’s series can be seen at: www.zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/goldchain/index.html

According to Roland Barthes, beauty is a question of centimeters. That’s probably so, seeing that proportion and beauty are inseparable friends. And doesn’t beauty indulge in a rectangular golden number? And yet, the striking beauty of Henry Brandt’s photo on the cover of the French magazine Réalités of November 1955 is evident before we measure anything at all, even before we determine the sex of the smile irradiating the entire document. The article informs readers that this smile belongs to an adolescent Peul Bororo boy participating in his tribe’s beauty contest. This magazine cover is part of the exhibit the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) devotes to the magazine and is also reproduced in the interesting book published for the occasion. In the homage they pay to Henri Brandt’s ethnographical work (texts and photos), the authors point out the stupid commentary contained in the caption an anonymous hand wrote for this picture of a « surprising character », likened jokingly to an ad for toothpaste or the extravagancies of Paris fashion. In 1955, Niger was part of the French colonial empire, and this kind of amused superiority was often aimed at our natives of AOF (French West Africa) and AEF (French East Africa). The last fifty years however witnessed the fall of empires, cultural mixing, the rise of mass tourism, fashion inspired by Africa, and changed the way we look at the world around us. Imagine a teenage boy today who, for a party, adopts the sophisticated make-up of the young Bororo boy, his beads, his silver jewelry, even his large-brimmed hat. He might not get on a magazine cover, but he’d be the prince of the party.

Hervé Le Goff

• the exhibit ‘Réalités, un mensuel illustré des Trente Glorieuses’, at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, 5/7 rue de Fourcy, Paris 4th, runs until March 30th.

• Anne de Mondenard, Michel Guerrin. Réalités, un mensuel français illustré (1946-1978). 160 pages, 15 x 20.5 cm. Actes Sud/MEP coedition, soft-cover, 29 Euros.