Publications

Our publications include various books and exhibition catalogs with different titles, published by Photo Elysée in collaboration with Swiss or foreign publishers, all connected to our programming.

Man Ray. Liberating Photography.

Man Ray (1890-1976) was a pioneer. With his conceptual approach and innovative techniques, he liberated photography from the steadfast orthodoxies by which it had been bound and opened the floodgates to new ways of thinking about the medium. Focusing on his studio and portrait work in the interwar y...
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Virginie Otth. Pour l'instant.

Capturing the almost-nothing, the everyday, the desire through a gaze. Between oneself and the world: photography as a focus. Is it possible to seize power (in imagery) with affection and gentleness? How to escape the ordinary, the commonplace, and the trivial aspects of the repetition of our action...
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Deborah Turbeville

The unique photographic work of Deborah Turbeville positions her as a major figure since her beginnings in the 1970s. Her work defies classification. Her images are difficult to date at first glance; they seem imbued with a dreamlike atmosphere. Turbeville stands out from her male contemporaries, wh...
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Flou

With its many quotations, the book, published together with delpire & co, creates a dialogue between the images and the way in which blur has been described by authors and artists as diverse as Charles Baudelaire, Julia Margaret Cameron and Pierre Bourdieu, thus highlighting the multiple implica...
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Le flou et la photographie

Beyond a single historical research and without limiting itself to the analysis of a photographic form, this study approaches the blur in the light of the phenomenological stakes it raises. Based on a meticulous investigation of French historical texts - from the 17th to the 20th century - on the wa...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Josef Koudelka. Ikonar

Ikonar is the nickname given to Josef Koudelka by a group of Roma he encountered on his travels. They refer to him as a "maker of icons" because they used his famous photographs of Roma communities as quasi-religious icons in their place of prayer. Koudelka being a globally respected "maker of photo...
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After Nature

This book, which provides a first overview of Swiss photography in the 19th century, highlights the extraordinary achievements of the pioneers, but also certain particularities induced by the society of the time, such as the use of photography for police purposes of the marked influence of tourism. ...
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Crossing Lines

Between fascination, inspiration and interrogation, Crossing Lines explores the connections between the expansion of the railroad, the rise of cinema and the experiments of the artistic avant-garde through an exceptional collection of photographs (Adolphe Braun, Alfred Stieglitz, Roger Parry, O. Win...
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Train Zug Treno Tren

Train Zug Treno Tren. At the crossroads of painting, photography and design. Three books, three museums, three exhibitions on a common theme: the train! The train that connects cities and countries, that allows encounters, that opens the door to dreams; the train that frightens, that separates, that...
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Jan Groover, photographer

"Formalism is everything": Jan Groover's statement alone sums up the plastic ambition of a work that today embodies one of the key moments in the history of photography and the genre of still life. Conducted through constant and varied experimentation, his research focused on forms and their abilit...
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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...
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Cabane

A real challenge. To build a cabin to accommodate the abominable snow beast. Will he come? Will it come? The reader is eager to find out. But the snow beast may not be where we want it to be... A funny and sensitive immersion in the photographs of Hans Steiner and Frédéric Boissonnas. Readership: fr...
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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...
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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...
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Liu Bolin

Published by the Musée de l'Elysée on the occasion of Liu Bolin's first monographic exhibition in Switzerland, this catalogue brings together for the first time an exceptional collection of works by the artist in China between 2005 and 2013. A sculptor, performer and photographer, Liu Bolin takes ...
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Charlie Chaplin

The catalog of the exclusive exhibition proposed by the museum, co-produced and hosted in 2018 by the Yuz Museum Shanghai, offers a major retrospective on the master of cinematic comedy through posters, photographs and archival documents, from the actor's London childhood to his exile in Switzerland...
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reGeneration3

Supervised by Anne Lacoste and Lydia Dorner reGeneration3 brings together fifty artists with twenty-five different nationalities, representing some forty art institutions. Their work is distinguished by their multidisciplinarity, ranging from printing and photographic series, artists’ books, multim...
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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...
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Fleurs

Feel an image? Not easy! But with a little imagination, why not? From spectacular country landscapes to warm interiors adorned with magnificent bouquets, the reader follows a facetious parrot who steals all the colors of the flowers. And we laugh to make him a photographic prank! A poetic and playfu...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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...
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René Burri

René Burri, Explosions of Sight provides never-before- seen insights into the worldfamous Magnum photo journalist’s life and work. Beyond the iconic images that gained him international renown, the many different facets of René Burri’s oeuvre are represented here: black-and-white and colour photogra...
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Slides

Although the history of photography was built around the question of printing, photographic projection developed significantly from the last third of the nineteenth century, particularly in the tradition of magic lantern shows. Long limited to the field of education, to public lectures and to popul...
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The Beauty of lines

Over the course of four decades, Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla have put together a collection of photographs that is widely recognized as among the World's most important private ones. Spanning the entire history of the medium, it lacks hardly any of the names that forged his history. It c...
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The Memory of the Future

The Memory of the Future presents a selection of works from the Photo Elysée collection, juxtaposed with pieces by contemporary artists. From reusing ancient techniques from the 19th and 20th centuries to the inception of historical works through contemporary reinterpretations, the book aims to pres...
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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...
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Vertical No Limit

The book presents 150 photographs mainly taken from the museum’s collections, illustrating the directions in which mountain photography has developed (science, tourism, mountaineering, art), as well as the formal aspects used by photographers from 1840 to the present (frontality, verticality and l...
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Werner Bischof

Helvetica reveals Bischof's Swiss work, notably focusing on the extraordinary contact sheets he created between 1933 and 1945, unpublished until now. The selection of contact sheets and photographs was made from the photographer's archives. It allows us to understand his influences, his experimentat...
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Wojciech Zamecznik

The artist Wojciech Zamecznik (1923–1967) was an influential figure on the postwar Polish art scene. He is famous for his numerous posters, and his sphere of activity covered publishing, music, cinema and exhibition design. Zamecznik was a pioneer in combining photography with graphic art. The cat...
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