| ISBN : | 978-3-03764-645-8 |
|---|---|
| Publication : | January 2026 |
Why do we become artists? And how? To what extent are we artists? Prompted by Catherine Grenier’s direct questions, Sophie Ristelhueber retraces the atypical journey of an artist who was not predestined for this late, yet fully realized, destiny. Clear-eyed and sincere, her testimony offers a compelling introduction to contemporary art, its aims, and its stakes. She evokes the drive of an “inner necessity” that leads her into war-torn territories, keeping pace with conflicts and wounds, in search of traces and scars.
Sophie Ristelhueber (*1949, Paris) is a towering figure in art photography today. Since her foundational work in the city of Beirut destroyed by the war at the beginning of the 1980s, she has followed a demanding path that tests the conditions in which the real is seen. She has developed an engaged reflection on territory and its history through a singular approach to landscape, which is conceived as a space that carries the traces of major upheavals of human activity and memory (historical wars, recent conflicts, civil wars, earthquakes), questioning, like an archeologist, the marks left by humanity on the surface, leaving the stigmata of history visible. Implying a complete personal engagement and a real experience of the land, Ristelhueber’s work borrows its tools (photography) and one of its major themes (war) from journalism, but bends them to the processes of art: her oeuvre is not built around a documentary project to represent, but, starting from an aesthetic project, to interrogate the notion of trace, both on the body and on the place.
Catherine Grenier has been the Director of the Giacometti Foundation and President of the Giacometti Institute in Paris since 2014. Former Deputy Director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne–Centre Pompidou, she has curated more than 30 exhibitions of modern and contemporary artists in France and abroad, and is the author of numerous books and publications on contemporary art.
This book is part of the Documents series, co-published with Les presses du réel and dedicated to critical writings.
