What can we learn from a three-year visit to the labyrinthine corridors of the Opéra Garnier? How to look at a famous building captured a thousand times? The photographer Vincent Desailly pushes the back doors and slips behind the scenes of the Palace, of which he transfigures the most ordinary details and revives the mythological dimension. Between past and present, materiality and abstraction, he captures the Opera as a living organism and casts a naturalistic and romantic eye on the institution. Photographing a ballet also means confronting the insoluble paradox of capturing movement: in De Marbre, the seconds extend to the distortion of the bodies.

To accompany this counterintuitive visual exploration, novelist Salomé Kiner sets the scene outside the Palais: her original novella begins in a nail art salon and ends with an encounter, that of the narrator with a painter whose name she has forgotten: “a mixture of schlag, chagasse and racaille. Schagaille?"

80pp, 270 × 334 mm, 34 photographs
Hardcover
Les éditions secondes, 2022