Prix Elysée Books

The result of a partnership between Photo Elysée and Parmigiani Fleurier, the Prix Elysée is a production support prize in the field of photography, which offers financial assistance and museum support to artists who are passionate about photography and books, so that they can take a decisive step in their career.

Debi Cornwall

Over the past ten years, Debi Cornwall has explored the narratives that have shaped the image of America. Her striking, formally composed color documentary photographs encourage us to reflect on the staging and normalization of state power. The exhibition presents two series of photographs that repr...

Special edition Prix Elysée 2023

Published by Photo Elysée, eight books individually present the projects of the nominees of the Prix Elysée 2023: Vincen Beeckman, Debi Cornwall, Siân Davey, Nicolai Howalt, Khashayar Javanmardi, Alice Mann, Gloria Oyarzabal et Virginie Rebetez. Since their nomination in June 2022, each of them has ...

Vincen Beeckman – Jump the Wall

"For Jump the Wall, Vincen went to several Belgian prisons – where you cannot photograph the buildings nor the people, and where the spontaneity of encounters does not exist. It is after all easy to understand the attraction of this impossible place, and why Vincen wanted to carry out a collaborativ...

Debi Cornwall – Crisis Actors: Performing Citizenship

"Photographs can be evidence, yes, but evidence of what? My project, Crisis Actors, examines the staging of reality and the performance of citizenship in the United States, a militarized country whose citizens cannot agree on what is true. I started this inquiry in my second book, Necessary Fictions...

Siân Davey – The Garden

"The Garden is a pilgrimage, an intentional act to cultivate a garden that is grounded in love: a reverential offering to humanity. We cleared our long-neglected garden, researched native flowers, soil, biodiversity; sourced organic local seeds, and sowed under the moon cycles, biodynamically. We of...

Nicolai Howalt – F.U.N.G.I.

"F.U.N.G.I. presents a 'new collection' of fungi based on different parameters than the strickly scientific or botanical. The work crosses boundaries between science and art and touches upon questions relating to existential eclogy, time and the phenomenology of images, as well as the significance o...

Khashayar Javanmardi – See the Caspian

"As a child, Khashayar Javanmardi counted down the days until he would go to the Caspian Sea to enjoy endless swimming. As a teenager, his first choice for a solo trip was immediately this beautiful blue sea. Later, all his romantic memories took place on the Caspian shorelines. Today, after years o...

Alice Mann – The Night is Young

"In South Africa the final year of high school is know as 'matric'. For students, the annual 'matric ball' carries huge significance and is a highly anticipated rite of passage. Despite South African students’ diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds, for them and their families alike, the ba...

Gloria Oyarzabal – La Blanche et la Noire (USUS FRUCTUS ABUSUS)

"The Black female body has a long history of scrutiny in the Western imaginary. As early as the 16th century it was labelled as sexually deviant, primitive, subhuman, hyper-sexual and an uncontrolable erotic creature by the white gaze. The extensive records of its oppression are characteristically r...

Virginie Rebetez – L’Inconnue

"How to photograph a corpse? What can and should be shown? How can we avoid voyeurism or, conversely, romanticism? What are the consequences of censoring the dead body? L’Inconnue is a project that extends the reflections around the representation and visibility of the dead body. It also questions a...

Kurt Tong

Following in the footsteps of a man named Franklin Lung, the book immerses the reader in the history of the Chinese diaspora, from the fall of the Middle Kingdom in 1912 until the 1950s. Through vintage images, press clippings, letters - correspondence between two fiancés - and photographs, artist K...

The Nominees' Book 2021

Published by Photo Elysée, this book presents the nominees' projects of the fourth edition of the Prix Elysée. Alexa Brunet, the duo Arguiñe Escandón and Yann Gross, Magali Koenig, Thomas Mailaender, Moises Saman, Assaf Shoshan, Alys Tomlinson and Kurt Tong were selected by the museum from among mor...

Luis Carlos Tovar

On 20 February 1980, Jaime Tovar was abducted by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC) and forced to wander for months through the tropical rainforest of the Colombian Amazonia. His son Luis Carlos, the author of this book, was just a f...

The Nominees' Book 2019

Published by Photo Elysée, this book presents the projects of the third Prix Elysée’s eight nominees. Laia Abril, Mathieu Asselin, Claude Baechtold, Alexandra Catiere, Alinka Echeverría, Gregory Halpern, Nicola Lo Calzo and Luis Carlos Tovar were selected by the museum from among almost 325 candidat...

Matthias Bruggmann

If the tens of thousands of pictures of torture taken by Syrian photographers do not attract the attention of a Western audience, what can a foreigner who doesn’t even speak Arabic hope to accomplish? The photographs of Matthias Bruggmann take a critical look at the representation of the atrocities ...

The Nominees' Book 2017

Published by Photo Elysée in partnership with Editions Photosynthèses in Arles, this book presents the projects of the eight nominees of the second edition of the Prix Elysée. Isabelle Blanc & Olivier Hilaire, Elina Brotherus, Matthias Bruggmann, David Jiménez, Sofie Knijff, Jim Naughten, Emeka ...

Martin Kollar

For several months, Martin Kollar roamed the roads of Europe and searched through his personal archives to bring together in a rich corpus his idea of the provisional – a difficult subject to address visually. Nevertheless, Kollar didn’t waver and, with Provisional Arrangement, offers us around thir...

The Nominees' Book 2015

The Prix Elysée is an award to support production in the field of photography. This book presents the projects of the eight nominees of the inaugural edition, selected by Photo Elysée from among more than 400 candidates from around the world. It invites us to enter into the intimacy of a work in pro...