Jean-Luc Bertini: American Solitudes
Jean-Luc Bertini spent 10 years on the road photographing the United States in fits and starts and in every season. For American Solitudes he traveled across the country with no preconceptions other than the formal one of working in color and using a 6×7 medium format. In the humanist vein inherited from the French tradition that allows him to bypass the “American photographic tableau”, he observes how Americans occupy their space and question their excess in occupying it, which often produces anonymity and loneliness. And since solitude favors observation, it predisposes the photographer to believe in visions, orchestrations, and mirages, so much so that these images sometimes seem to transcend the ordinary scenes they reveal.
American Solitudes is a book published by Actes Sud.
In his preface, Richard Ford, author of The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land and Let Me Be Frank With You, focuses on the physiognomies of loneliness in America: unique of American solitudes, in non-binary terms, in which what is ours does not belong only to us.
About the Author
Born in 1969 in Meulan-en-Yvelines, France. He lives and works in Ivry-sur-Seine, France.
Jean-Luc Bertini is a renowned portrait painter who carries out several long-term projects that regularly take him from east to west.
From her first book by him, Solovki, la bibliothèque perdue (Solovki, the lost library) to Amérique, des écrivains en liberté (America, writers in freedom), her work of him questions humanity’s fragile place at the center. of its environment. About sixty years after Robert Frank, he spent a decade traveling across the United States with the same desire to see. The result was the series Américaines solitudes, in which he invented what Gilles Mora calls in the book’s afterword a “poetics of isolation”.
JEAN-LUC BERTINI: AMERICAN SOLITUDES
CROISIÈRE
4 JULY – 26 SEPTEMBER 2021
Les Rencontres D’arles
