Sans lieu d'édition

Autograph letter signed by Roland Barthes, written in blue ink.
Date at the top of the letter and signature at the bottom of the letter.
Folds caused by mailing.

Autograph letter signed Roland Barthes, written in black ink.
Date at the top of the letter and signature at the bottom of the letter.
Folds caused by mailing and 2 perforations.

Signed autograph card of Roland Barthes, written in blue ink.
Date at the top of the letter and signature at the bottom of the letter.
Folds caused by mailing and 2 perforations.

First edition, rare.
Contemporary full vellum binding. Smooth unlettered spine. Top headcap torn. Lack to lower edge of back board.
Two princes disguised as bourgeois make the journey on horseback to the very famous fair of Guibray, in Normandy. Their journey, recounted by their squire, is a succession of chance encounters. The narrator gives an ample description of the Guibray fair while continuing the gallant and comic adventures of the two princes.

NB: This work is available at the bookshop on request within 48 hours.

Handwritten page signed by Francis Ambrière in the guest book of Mrs. O'Heguerly, written in blue ink.
Signature and date at the bottom of the page.

Francis Aulmière writes that he feels "small" by writing in this book where "so many great men" have written. He "forfeits" by preferring silence to "definitive thoughts". He then thanked Mrs O'Heguerly for her welcome.

First edition printed in 120 copies numbered copies on Rives, this copy one of 60 signed and justified by Pierre Bettencourt to colophon with, as frontispiece, an originale engraving and 2 reproductions in color, the tirage de tête.
Publisher's binding .
A nice and rare copy.

Large original black and white photograph by Marc Trivier.
Original gelatin silver print unsigned, as with most of Trivier's works.
A precious original gelatin silver print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists who, despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his earlier portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, allowing free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, « Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière » in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident." ["In the boxes, the prints warp, but what does it matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, « Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier », Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity to the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple in nature, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.


"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, every thing, every being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).


The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouches, no reframings. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence intensified by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which only welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).


It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light returns us to a real instant, to Barthes' "that-has-been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):


"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, this is perhaps what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We only fix what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)



Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and the slaughterhouses that he places alongside the celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris devotes an important retrospective to him in 2011.
The photographs of the insane that Trivier made in the same period were deliberately mixed with those of the artists during the 2011 Parisian retrospective. Far from an attempt to oppose madness and genius, this juxtaposition was on the contrary the occasion for a questioning of our gaze on these two phantasmatic poles of the human person.


The series devoted to slaughterhouses might seem distant from Trivier's other works. However, like the insane, slaughterhouses are part of those shameful images of a marginality that one does not want to see. It is a place rejected outside the city, far from gazes, far from men. There are moreover almost never men in these photographs.
Unlike Franju's film, Le Sang des bêtes, in 1949, Trivier is not interested in the gesture of work in slaughterhouses. He captures them empty, populated by corpses or animals blinded before being led to death. The photographer draws inspiration from Bacon's painting, whom he photographed in 1981, and from the latter's relationship to the body. We find all the English painter's pity for meat and animals in Trivier's series.


"J'ai toujours été très touché par les images relatives aux abattoirs et à la viande, et pour moi elles sont liées étroitement à tout ce qu'est la Crucifixion... C'est sûr, nous sommes de la viande, nous sommes des carcasses en puissance. Si je vais chez un boucher, je trouve toujours surprenant de ne pas être là, à la place de l'animal... " ["I have always been very moved by images relating to slaughterhouses and meat, and for me they are closely linked to everything that is the Crucifixion... It's certain, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go to a butcher, I always find it surprising not to be there, in place of the animal..."] (Francis Bacon in Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, par Gilles Deleuze).


His photos show us the beasts as martyrs like Marsyas or Saint Peter. Trivier reveals the tragedy of the body dispossessed of presence, photographing blind, dead animals, dismembered and emptied of their entrails that black and white transforms into marble. But it is always man who is reflected in these portraits of soulless flesh, a man who, through Marc Trivier's silver mirror, projects himself into this blind flesh, and crosses for an instant the infinitesimal space of the gaze that separates them.


"Les vaches régulièrement photographiées par Marc Trivier à l'abattoir d'Anderlecht manifestent la même essence que ses visages humains." ["The cows regularly photographed by Marc Trivier at the Anderlecht slaughterhouse manifest the same essence as his human faces."] (Henri Van Lier « Le timbre photonique, Robert Frank et Marc Trivier », in les cahiers de la photographie 1992)

Large original black and white photograph by Marc Trivier.
Original gelatin silver print unsigned, as with most of Trivier's works.
A precious original gelatin silver print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists who, despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his earlier portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, allowing free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, « Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière » in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident." ["In the boxes, the prints warp, but what does it matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, « Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier », Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity to the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple in nature, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.


"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, every thing, every being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).


The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouches, no reframings. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence intensified by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which only welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).


It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light returns us to a real instant, to Barthes' "that-has-been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):


"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, this is perhaps what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We only fix what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)



Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and the slaughterhouses that he places alongside the celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris devotes an important retrospective to him in 2011.
The photographs of the insane that Trivier made in the same period were deliberately mixed with those of the artists during the 2011 Parisian retrospective. Far from an attempt to oppose madness and genius, this juxtaposition was on the contrary the occasion for a questioning of our gaze on these two phantasmatic poles of the human person.


The series devoted to slaughterhouses might seem distant from Trivier's other works. However, like the insane, slaughterhouses are part of those shameful images of a marginality that one does not want to see. It is a place rejected outside the city, far from gazes, far from men. There are moreover almost never men in these photographs.
Unlike Franju's film, Le Sang des bêtes, in 1949, Trivier is not interested in the gesture of work in slaughterhouses. He captures them empty, populated by corpses or animals blinded before being led to death. The photographer draws inspiration from Bacon's painting, whom he photographed in 1981, and from the latter's relationship to the body. We find all the English painter's pity for meat and animals in Trivier's series.


"J'ai toujours été très touché par les images relatives aux abattoirs et à la viande, et pour moi elles sont liées étroitement à tout ce qu'est la Crucifixion... C'est sûr, nous sommes de la viande, nous sommes des carcasses en puissance. Si je vais chez un boucher, je trouve toujours surprenant de ne pas être là, à la place de l'animal... " ["I have always been very moved by images relating to slaughterhouses and meat, and for me they are closely linked to everything that is the Crucifixion... It's certain, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go to a butcher, I always find it surprising not to be there, in place of the animal..."] (Francis Bacon in Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, par Gilles Deleuze).


His photos show us the beasts as martyrs like Marsyas or Saint Peter. Trivier reveals the tragedy of the body dispossessed of presence, photographing blind, dead animals, dismembered and emptied of their entrails that black and white transforms into marble. But it is always man who is reflected in these portraits of soulless flesh, a man who, through Marc Trivier's silver mirror, projects himself into this blind flesh, and crosses for an instant the infinitesimal space of the gaze that separates them.


"Les vaches régulièrement photographiées par Marc Trivier à l'abattoir d'Anderlecht manifestent la même essence que ses visages humains." ["The cows regularly photographed by Marc Trivier at the Anderlecht slaughterhouse manifest the same essence as his human faces."] (Henri Van Lier « Le timbre photonique, Robert Frank et Marc Trivier », in les cahiers de la photographie 1992)

Large original black and white photograph by Marc Trivier.
Original silver gelatin print unsigned, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he hangs them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, « Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière » in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when exposed: "In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, « Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier », Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple by nature, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.


« Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude. » ["In his cosmogony, every thing, every being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).


The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouches, no reframings. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by irradiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


« Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." » ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).


It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "that has been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):


« De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie. » ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

« La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là. » ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We fix only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)



Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet ... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris devoted an important retrospective to him in 2011.
The photographs of the insane that Trivier made in the same period were deliberately mixed with those of artists during the 2011 Parisian retrospective. Far from an attempt to oppose madness and genius, this juxtaposition was instead the occasion for questioning our gaze on these two phantasmatic poles of the human person.


The series devoted to slaughterhouses might seem distant from Trivier's other works. However, like the insane, slaughterhouses are part of these shameful images of a marginality that one does not want to see. It is a place rejected outside the city, far from gazes, far from men. There are moreover almost never any men in these photographs.
Unlike Franju's film, Le Sang des bêtes, in 1949, Trivier is not interested in the gesture of work in slaughterhouses. He captures them empty, populated by corpses or animals blinded before being led to death. The photographer draws inspiration from Bacon's painting, whom he moreover photographed in 1981, and from the latter's relationship to the body. We find all the pity of the English painter for meat and animals in Trivier's series.


« J'ai toujours été très touché par les images relatives aux abattoirs et à la viande, et pour moi elles sont liées étroitement à tout ce qu'est la Crucifixion... C'est sûr, nous sommes de la viande, nous sommes des carcasses en puissance. Si je vais chez un boucher, je trouve toujours surprenant de ne pas être là, à la place de l'animal... » ["I have always been very touched by images relating to slaughterhouses and meat, and for me they are closely linked to all that is the Crucifixion... It's certain, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go to a butcher's, I always find it surprising not to be there, in the animal's place..."] (Francis Bacon in Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation , par Gilles Deleuze).


His photos show us beasts as martyrs like Marsyas or Saint Peter. Trivier unveils the tragedy of the body dispossessed of presence, photographing blind, dead, dismembered animals emptied of their entrails that black and white transforms into marble. But it is always man who is reflected in these portraits of flesh without souls, a man who, through Marc Trivier's silver mirror, projects himself into this blind flesh, and crosses for an instant the infinitesimal space of the gaze that separates them.


« Les vaches régulièrement photographiées par Marc Trivier à l'abattoir d'Anderlecht manifestent la même essence que ses visages humains.» ["The cows regularly photographed by Marc Trivier at the Anderlecht slaughterhouse manifest the same essence as his human faces."] (Henri Van Lier « Le timbre photonique, Robert Frank et Marc Trivier », in les cahiers de la photographie 1992)

Large original black and white photograph by Marc Trivier.
Original silver gelatin print unsigned, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he hangs them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, « Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière » in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when exposed: "In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, « Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier », Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple by nature, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.


« Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude. » ["In his cosmogony, every thing, every being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).


The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouches, no reframings. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by irradiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


« Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." » ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).


It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "that has been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):


« De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie. » ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

« La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là. » ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We fix only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)



Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet ... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris devoted an important retrospective to him in 2011.
The photographs of the insane that Trivier made in the same period were deliberately mixed with those of artists during the 2011 Parisian retrospective. Far from an attempt to oppose madness and genius, this juxtaposition was instead the occasion for questioning our gaze on these two phantasmatic poles of the human person.


The series devoted to slaughterhouses might seem distant from Trivier's other works. However, like the insane, slaughterhouses are part of these shameful images of a marginality that one does not want to see. It is a place rejected outside the city, far from gazes, far from men. There are moreover almost never any men in these photographs.
Unlike Franju's film, Le Sang des bêtes, in 1949, Trivier is not interested in the gesture of work in slaughterhouses. He captures them empty, populated by corpses or animals blinded before being led to death. The photographer draws inspiration from Bacon's painting, whom he moreover photographed in 1981, and from the latter's relationship to the body. We find all the pity of the English painter for meat and animals in Trivier's series.


« J'ai toujours été très touché par les images relatives aux abattoirs et à la viande, et pour moi elles sont liées étroitement à tout ce qu'est la Crucifixion... C'est sûr, nous sommes de la viande, nous sommes des carcasses en puissance. Si je vais chez un boucher, je trouve toujours surprenant de ne pas être là, à la place de l'animal... » ["I have always been very touched by images relating to slaughterhouses and meat, and for me they are closely linked to all that is the Crucifixion... It's certain, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go to a butcher's, I always find it surprising not to be there, in the animal's place..."] (Francis Bacon in Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation , par Gilles Deleuze).


His photos show us beasts as martyrs like Marsyas or Saint Peter. Trivier unveils the tragedy of the body dispossessed of presence, photographing blind, dead, dismembered animals emptied of their entrails that black and white transforms into marble. But it is always man who is reflected in these portraits of flesh without souls, a man who, through Marc Trivier's silver mirror, projects himself into this blind flesh, and crosses for an instant the infinitesimal space of the gaze that separates them.


« Les vaches régulièrement photographiées par Marc Trivier à l'abattoir d'Anderlecht manifestent la même essence que ses visages humains.» ["The cows regularly photographed by Marc Trivier at the Anderlecht slaughterhouse manifest the same essence as his human faces."] (Henri Van Lier « Le timbre photonique, Robert Frank et Marc Trivier », in les cahiers de la photographie 1992)

Large original black and white photograph created by Marc Trivier.
Original silver gelatin print unsigned, like most of Trivier's works.
Irregular cutting on the right edge of the photograph.
Precious original silver gelatin print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work just as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "In the boxes, the prints buckle, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier", Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about the multiple, this intervention by the artist throughout the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.


"In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude." (Luc Desbenoit).


The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are neither retouches nor recroppings. We find in his work the same square format highlighted by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


"Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance." (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).


It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "that-has-been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):


"From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, this is perhaps what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers." (Marc Trivier).

"Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' One fixes only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there." (Marc Trivier)



Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and the slaughterhouses which he places alongside the celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris devoted an important retrospective to him in 2011.
The photographs of the insane that Trivier created in the same period were deliberately mixed with those of artists during the Parisian retrospective of 2011. Far from an attempt to oppose madness and genius, this juxtaposition was on the contrary the occasion for questioning our gaze on these two fantasmatic poles of the human person.


The series devoted to slaughterhouses might seem distant from Trivier's other works. However, like the insane, slaughterhouses form part of these shameful images of a marginality that one does not want to see. It is a place rejected outside the city, far from gazes, far from men. There are indeed almost never men in these photographs.
Contrary to Franju's film, Le Sang des bêtes, in 1949, Trivier is not interested in the gesture of work in slaughterhouses. He captures them empty, populated with corpses or animals blinded before being led to death. The photographer draws inspiration from Bacon's painting, whom he photographed in 1981, and from the latter's relationship to the body. We find all the pity of the English painter for meat and animals in Trivier's series.


"I have always been very touched by images relating to slaughterhouses and meat, and for me they are closely linked to all that the Crucifixion is... It's certain, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go to a butcher's, I always find it surprising not to be there, in the animal's place..." (Francis Bacon in Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, by Gilles Deleuze).


His photos show us the beasts as martyrs like Marsyas or Saint Peter. Trivier reveals the tragedy of the body dispossessed of presence, photographing blind, dead, butchered animals emptied of their entrails that black and white transforms into marble. But it is always man who is reflected in these portraits of flesh without souls, a man who, through Marc Trivier's silver mirror, projects himself into this blind flesh, and crosses for an instant the infinitesimal space of the gaze that separates them.


"The cows regularly photographed by Marc Trivier at the Anderlecht slaughterhouse manifest the same essence as his human faces." (Henri Van Lier "Le timbre photonique, Robert Frank et Marc Trivier", in les cahiers de la photographie 1992)

Original black and white photograph created and printed by Marc Trivier.
Silver gelatin print unsigned, like most of Trivier's works. Unique proof printed by the artist.
Precious original silver gelatin print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work just as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "In the boxes, the prints buckle, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier", Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about the multiple, this intervention by the artist throughout the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.

Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.
"In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude." (Luc Desbenoit).
The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are neither retouches nor recroppings. We find in his work the same square format that traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to Trivier's medium and which obsesses him, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present:
"From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, this is perhaps what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers." (Marc Trivier).

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and the slaughterhouses which he places alongside the celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris devoted an important retrospective to him in 2011.

Large original black and white photographic portrait created by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver gelatin print, like most of Trivier's works.
Photo perforated at the level of the black square and slightly torn on the left edge.
Precious original silver gelatin proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, « Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière » in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "In boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, « Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier », Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple by nature, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude." (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouching, no cropping. We find in his work the same square format underlined by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the makeup of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


"Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance." (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "that-has-been" (Camera Lucida, 1980):


"From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, this is perhaps what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers." (Marc Trivier).

"Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We fix only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there." (Marc Trivier)


Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet ... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from The International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris devoted an important retrospective to him in 2011.

The photographs of the insane that Trivier made during the same period were deliberately mixed with those of artists during the 2011 Parisian retrospective. Far from an attempt to oppose madness and genius, this juxtaposition was on the contrary an opportunity to question our gaze on these two phantasmatic poles of the human person.
While the photographs of doctors like those of Charcot in the nineteenth century emphasize the illness of patients and make them pose in ways that render their symptoms visible, those taken by Trivier do not seek to make the madman a simple witness to a pathology, nor even an "other," someone who would be characterized by his difference. As with his series on artists, Marc Trivier steps out of the system of posing which is an artifice to reach the humanity of his subjects. These men have a powerful gaze and a strong presence that contradicts their anonymity.
Like artists, whose mystery they seem to share, the "madmen" question our own presence.

Large original black and white photograph created and printed by Marc Trivier.
Unsigned silver gelatin print, like most of Trivier's works. Unique proof printed by the artist.

Precious original silver gelatin proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, « Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière » in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "In boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, « Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier », Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple by nature, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude." (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouching, no cropping. We find in his work the same square format underlined by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the makeup of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


"Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance." (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "that-has-been" (Camera Lucida, 1980):


"From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, this is perhaps what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers." (Marc Trivier).

"Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We fix only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there." (Marc Trivier)


Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet ... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from The International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris devoted an important retrospective to him in 2011.

Original black and white photograph created and printed by Marc Trivier.
Unsigned gelatin silver print, like most of Trivier's works. Unique proof printed by the artist.

Precious original gelatin silver proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "creates his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A print by Marc Trivier resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." ["Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011]. This "vie du papier" ["life of the paper"] participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident." ["In the boxes, the prints warp, but what does it matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple in nature, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are neither retouches nor reframings. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we are not faced with the staging of a subject but with a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to a moment of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "brûlure" ["burning"] of light refers us to a real moment, to Barthes' "ça a été" ["that has been"] (La Chambre Claire, 1980):


"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We only fix what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)


Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the mentally ill and slaughterhouses which he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris devotes an important retrospective to him in 2011.

Original black and white photograph created and printed by Marc Trivier.
Unsigned gelatin silver print, like most of Trivier's works. Unique proof printed by the artist.
Upper edge cut irregularly.

Precious original gelatin silver proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "creates his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A print by Marc Trivier resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." ["Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011]. This "vie du papier" ["life of the paper"] participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident." ["In the boxes, the prints warp, but what does it matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple in nature, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are neither retouches nor reframings. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we are not faced with the staging of a subject but with a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to a moment of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "brûlure" ["burning"] of light refers us to a real moment, to Barthes' "ça a été" ["that has been"] (La Chambre Claire, 1980):


"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We only fix what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)


Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the mentally ill and slaughterhouses which he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris devotes an important retrospective to him in 2011.

Large original black and white photograph realized and printed by Marc Trivier.
Unsigned silver gelatin print, like most of Trivier's works. Unique proof printed by the artist.

Precious original silver gelatin print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A print by Marc Trivier resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "In boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier", Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about multiples, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude." (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are neither retouches nor reframings. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


"Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, the latter welcoming beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance." (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, delivered from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light refers us to a real instant, to Barthes' "that has been" (Camera Lucida, 1980):


"From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers." (Marc Trivier).

"Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' One fixes only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there." (Marc Trivier)


Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is equally interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris devoted an important retrospective to him in 2011.

Large original black and white photographic portrait of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature winner by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver gelatin print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin print by the famous Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier", Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is by essence multiple, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are neither retouches nor cropping. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the makeup of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "that has been" (Camera Lucida, 1980):

"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' One fixes only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and the slaughterhouses that he places alongside the celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris dedicates an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his time that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken face-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself by his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. He perhaps awaits more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or even Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier", Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The imbalance that results reveals the fragilities of these strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait is re-welding the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The presence of the photographer is perceptible in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone in the process of taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned gelatin silver print, like most of Trivier's works.
A precious original gelatin silver print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "produces his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A print by Marc Trivier resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" ["vie du papier"] participates in the work just as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident." ["In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about multiples, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There is neither retouching nor cropping. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, welcoming beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearing."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" ["brûlure"] of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "that-has-been" ["ça a été"] (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, this is perhaps what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We fix only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet ... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the mentally ill and slaughterhouses which he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from The International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris dedicates an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his time that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken head-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. Perhaps he waits for more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier" ["An image of fatigue in Marc Trivier"], Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these such strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait means reuniting the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The photographer's presence is perceptible in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned gelatin silver print, like most of Trivier's works.
A precious original gelatin silver print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "produces his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A print by Marc Trivier resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" ["vie du papier"] participates in the work just as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident." ["In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about multiples, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There is neither retouching nor cropping. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, welcoming beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearing."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" ["brûlure"] of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "that-has-been" ["ça a été"] (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, this is perhaps what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We fix only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet ... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the mentally ill and slaughterhouses which he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from The International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris dedicates an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his time that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken head-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. Perhaps he waits for more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier" ["An image of fatigue in Marc Trivier"], Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these such strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait means reuniting the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The photographer's presence is perceptible in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver gelatin print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his earlier portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident." ["In boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about multiples, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, everything, every being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouches, no reframings. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the makeup of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we are not faced with the staging of a subject but with a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which only welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes's "that-has-been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, this is perhaps what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We only fix what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the mentally ill and slaughterhouses which he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris dedicates an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his time that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken face-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself by his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. He perhaps awaits more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier" ["An image of fatigue in Marc Trivier"], Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait is reuniting the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The presence of the photographer is felt in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone in the process of taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver gelatin print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his earlier portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident." ["In boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about multiples, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, everything, every being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouches, no reframings. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the makeup of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we are not faced with the staging of a subject but with a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which only welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes's "that-has-been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, this is perhaps what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We only fix what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the mentally ill and slaughterhouses which he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris dedicates an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his time that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken face-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself by his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. He perhaps awaits more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier" ["An image of fatigue in Marc Trivier"], Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait is reuniting the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The presence of the photographer is felt in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone in the process of taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

The generation of abstract expressionists of which Willem de Kooning is part experienced great media coverage. The group is primarily known through its male figures, Pollock, Rothko, or Franz Kline. These painters play on their masculinity to put forward an action painting where the body enters the canvas. De Kooning does not hesitate, in the manner of Picasso, to have himself photographed shirtless in his studio or in full struggle with his canvas. However, Marc Trivier does not show him to us in this public image. He manages to circumvent it to show us a painter slumped in his chair, perhaps tired from the work accomplished, who emerges from the arena of painting that critic Rosenberg spoke of ("A un certain moment, les peintres américains [...] commencèrent à considérer la toile comme une arène dans laquelle agir, plutôt que comme un espace dans lequel reproduire, recréer, analyser ou "exprimer" un objet réel ou imaginaire. Ce qui devait passer sur la toile n'était pas une image, mais un fait, une action." ["At a certain moment, American painters [...] began to consider the canvas as an arena in which to act, rather than as a space in which to reproduce, recreate, analyze or 'express' a real or imaginary object. What was to pass on the canvas was not an image, but a fact, an action."] 1952).

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned gelatin silver print, as with most of Trivier's works.
Precious original gelatin silver proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his earlier portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, allowing free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exposed: "In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier", Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity to the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about the multiple, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, of madmen, of trees or of slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude." (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouching, no cropping. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the makeup of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance." (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, delivered from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burn" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes's "that-has-been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, this is perhaps what remains: a singular mode of recording the burn of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers." (Marc Trivier).

"Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' One fixes only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there." (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and the slaughterhouses that he places opposite the celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris devoted an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his time that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken frontally, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. He perhaps awaits more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chairs. Intimate images." (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier", Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The imbalance that results reveals the fragilities of these such strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait is welding back together the name and the face." (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The presence of the photographer is perceptible in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"What interested me was not simply to photograph a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone in the process of taking the photo of someone else." (Marc Trivier).

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned gelatin silver print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original gelatin silver print by the famous Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "prints his own work on Ilford baryta paper, dedicating several days of work to each print, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he hangs them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when exposed: "In boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about multiples, this intervention by the artist throughout the creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouches, no reframings. We find in his work the same square format underlined by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the makeup of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to a moment of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real moment, to Barthes's "that has been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We fix only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the alienated and slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris dedicates an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his era that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken from the front, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. Perhaps he is waiting for more natural behavior. And we find ourselves face to face with Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier" ["An image of fatigue in Marc Trivier"], Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait means welding together the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of a moment of real life. The presence of the photographer is felt in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned gelatin silver print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original gelatin silver print by the famous Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "prints his own work on Ilford baryta paper, dedicating several days of work to each print, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he hangs them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when exposed: "In boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about multiples, this intervention by the artist throughout the creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouches, no reframings. We find in his work the same square format underlined by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the makeup of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to a moment of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real moment, to Barthes's "that has been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We fix only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the alienated and slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris dedicates an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his era that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken from the front, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. Perhaps he is waiting for more natural behavior. And we find ourselves face to face with Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier" ["An image of fatigue in Marc Trivier"], Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait means welding together the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of a moment of real life. The presence of the photographer is felt in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver gelatin print, as with most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his earlier portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, allowing free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when exposed: "In boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier," Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about the multiple, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude." (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouching, no reframing. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the makeup of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by irradiating and singular light, witness to a moment of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, the latter welcoming beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance." (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, delivered from all artifice, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "that-has-been" (Camera Lucida, 1980):

"From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, this is perhaps what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers." (Marc Trivier).

"Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' One only fixes what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there." (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and slaughterhouses which he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from The International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris dedicated an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his time that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken from the front, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. He perhaps awaits more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images." (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier," Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? To make a portrait is to weld together the name and the face." (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of a moment of real life. The presence of the photographer is perceptible in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"What interested me was not simply to photograph a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone in the process of taking a photo of someone else." (Marc Trivier).

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver gelatin print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his prints himself on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" ["vie du papier"] participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident." ["In the boxes, the prints buckle, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about multiples, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouches, no cropping. We find in his work the same square format underlined by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we are not facing the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by irradiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" ["brûlure"] of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes's "ça a été" ["that-has-been"] (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' One fixes only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and slaughterhouses which he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris dedicates an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his time that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken head-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. Perhaps he awaits more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier" ["An image of fatigue in Marc Trivier"], Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these such strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs could also be someone? Making a portrait is soldering the name and the face back together."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The photographer's presence is felt in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone in the process of taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver gelatin print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his prints himself on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" ["vie du papier"] participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident." ["In the boxes, the prints buckle, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about multiples, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouches, no cropping. We find in his work the same square format underlined by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we are not facing the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by irradiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" ["brûlure"] of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes's "ça a été" ["that-has-been"] (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' One fixes only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and slaughterhouses which he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris dedicates an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his time that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken head-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. Perhaps he awaits more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier" ["An image of fatigue in Marc Trivier"], Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these such strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs could also be someone? Making a portrait is soldering the name and the face back together."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The photographer's presence is felt in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone in the process of taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned gelatin silver print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original gelatin silver print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists who, despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his earlier portraits; the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "produces his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work just as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident." ["In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple by nature, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are neither retouching nor cropping. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, delivered from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burn" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "ça a été" ["that has been"] (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burn of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We fix only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the alienated and the slaughterhouses that he places alongside the celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris dedicated an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his era that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken face-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. Perhaps he awaits more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier" ["An image of fatigue in Marc Trivier"], Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait is to rejoin the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The presence of the photographer is perceptible in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone in the process of taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned gelatin silver print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original gelatin silver print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists who, despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his earlier portraits; the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "produces his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work just as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident." ["In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple by nature, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are neither retouching nor cropping. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, delivered from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burn" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "ça a été" ["that has been"] (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burn of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We fix only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the alienated and the slaughterhouses that he places alongside the celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris dedicated an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his era that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken face-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. Perhaps he awaits more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier" ["An image of fatigue in Marc Trivier"], Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait is to rejoin the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The presence of the photographer is perceptible in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone in the process of taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned gelatin silver print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original gelatin silver proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his old portraits; the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his prints himself on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, « Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière » in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: « Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident. » ["In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, « Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier », Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about multiples, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

« Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude. » ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are neither retouches nor reframings. We find in his work the same square format underlined by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

« Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition. » ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, delivered from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light refers us to a real instant, to Barthes' "that has been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

« De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie. » ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

« La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là. » ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' One only fixes what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the mentally ill and slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris dedicates an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his time that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken face-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

« (...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes. » ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. He perhaps awaits more natural behavior. And we find ourselves face to face with Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, « Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier », Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

« Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage. » ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? To make a portrait is to reunite the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The presence of the photographer is perceptible in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

« Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre. » ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned gelatin silver print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original gelatin silver proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his old portraits; the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his prints himself on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, « Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière » in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: « Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident. » ["In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, « Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier », Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about multiples, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

« Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude. » ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are neither retouches nor reframings. We find in his work the same square format underlined by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

« Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition. » ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, delivered from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light refers us to a real instant, to Barthes' "that has been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

« De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie. » ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

« La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là. » ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' One only fixes what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the mentally ill and slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris dedicates an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his time that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken face-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

« (...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes. » ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. He perhaps awaits more natural behavior. And we find ourselves face to face with Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, « Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier », Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

« Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage. » ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? To make a portrait is to reunite the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The presence of the photographer is perceptible in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

« Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre. » ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

FOUCAULT Michel Portrait of Michel Foucault. Original artist's photograph.

Large original photographic portrait in black and white by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver print, like most of Trivier's works.
Small tear to upper edge.
A handsome original silver print proof by the famous Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who - despite early international success - preferred to limit his output to preserve the coherence of his oeuvre. Marc Trivier doesn't do after-prints of his old portraits, and in any case, the paper he used for printing is no longer sold. The artist "prints his images himself on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each. He pays special attention to rendering the whites, contrasted with unusually dense blacks. A Marc Trivier print is like none other. When he does agree to exhibit his images, he suspends them in self-made stainless steel frames, giving the paper the freedom to live its life" (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière [Marc Trivier and the Tragedy of Light]" in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work in the same way as the various changes that the photographs undergo when they're exhibited: "In the boxes, the prints buckle, but so what: it's the photographer who's giving rise to this sort of accident" (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier [The inescapable encounters of the photographer Marc Trivier], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensibility for the material aspect of his work. Though photography essentially relies on the multiple, this intervention by the artist in the entire process of creation gives these prints an autobiographical air.
  

Whether photographing artists, mad people, trees, or abattoirs, Marc Trivier approaches all his subjects with a gaze that is as precise as it is intense.
 

"In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, whether plant, animal, or human, deserves the same respect. Because all are confronted by the same cast-iron law: solitude" (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There is no retouching and no reframing. One finds throughout his oeuvre the same square format underlined by the squares of the negative that Trivier leaves on his images. This frame traps our gaze in the photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for a cutting black and white. All artificiality gone, we are faced not with the arrangement of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiant and singular light, testimony to a lived moment and not a pose. It is this light, tied to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's various series:

 

"Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which does not welcome beings - humans, trees, or animals - but rather burns them before disappearance" (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this tragedy of light, freed of all artifice, that gives his works the air that makes them so immediate. This "burning" of the light throws us back into a real moment, to the "that happened" of Barthes (Camera Lucida, 1980): 

 

"Of thirty-five years of photography, of various obsessions, perhaps this is what is left: a singular way of recording the burning of the light, carried through one image after another, in a succession of propositions that seem to resemble one another and yet each is just as singular as the fraction of the moment to which it refers" (Marc Trivier).

"Photography says only one thing: 'that happened.' You can only record what has been. If there is a tragedy to it, it is in this" (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet, etc.: the most famous writers and artists posed for Trivier. At the same time, the artist was just as interested in the margins of society, to what people did not wish to see. He therefore photographed the mentally challenged and abattoirs, images he then contrasted with celebrities. From the late '80s, his work has been unanimously acknowledged and he received the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988, as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris also devoted an important retrospective to Trivier in 2011.
 
 

The photographs of the famous figures of his era that Trivier took do not seek to show the public face of these artists. Taken head-on and looking into the lens, they give us an image of intimacy:
 

"...instead of being just another portraitist for writers and artists, he marginalized himself by his actions: under the pretext of adjustments, he made his models wait; he made them pose for several minutes, which gives them a weary air. He may have been waiting for them to behave more naturally. And so we are faced with Francis Bacon balancing precariously, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or even Michel Foucault more or less squeezed into their chairs. Intimate images" (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier [Marc Trivier's Tired Look]", Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal worlds, mostly in their bedrooms, the subjects let themselves go, are no longer in charge of their image. The lack of balance that results reveals the fragilities of these strong characters and allows Trivier to reconstitute the unity of the private body with the public work.
 

"I was reading Genet ; for me Genet was letters on a page. And then one day I saw a photo of him and there was some kind of a break. How was it possible that these symbols were also an actual person? Taking a portrait is reconciling the name and the face. " (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the witness of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of a moment from real life. The presence of the photographer is palpable in each portrait Trivier takes:

 

"What interested me was not simply capturing a body or a face, but that specific situation where one is in the process of taking a photo of another" (Marc Trivier). 

 
 

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver gelatin print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin print by the famous Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, allowing free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about multiples, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude." (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouching, no cropping. We find in his work the same square format underlined by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


"Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance." (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burn" of light refers us to a real instant, to Barthes's "that-has-been" (Camera Lucida, 1980):


"From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, this is perhaps what remains: a singular mode of recording the burn of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers." (Marc Trivier).

"Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We fix only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there." (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the mentally ill and slaughterhouses which he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris dedicates an important retrospective to him in 2011.

The photographs of the mentally ill that Trivier made during the same period were deliberately mixed with those of artists during the 2011 Paris retrospective. Far from an attempt to oppose madness and genius, this juxtaposition was instead an opportunity to question our gaze on these two phantasmatic poles of the human person.
While photographs by doctors like those of Charcot in the 19th century emphasize the illness of patients and make them pose in ways to make their symptoms visible, those taken by Trivier do not seek to make the madman a simple witness to a pathology, nor even an "other," someone who would be characterized by his difference. As with his series on artists, Marc Trivier breaks away from the system of posing which is an artifice to reach the humanity of his subjects. These men have a powerful gaze and a strong presence that contradicts their anonymity.
Like the artists, whose mystery they seem to share, the "madmen" question our own presence.

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver gelatin print, as with most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin print by the renowned Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, chose to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his older portraits; the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, allowing free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, « Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière » ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when exhibited: "In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, « Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier » ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple in nature, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura on these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze that is both precise and intense.

« Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude. » ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photographs comes from this nakedness. There are no retouches, no reframings. We find in his work the same square format underlined by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence heightened by radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


« Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition. » ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes's "that has been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):


« De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie. » ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, this is perhaps what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

« La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là. » ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We only fix what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)


Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet ... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the mentally ill and slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from The International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris devotes an important retrospective to him in 2011.

The photographs of the mentally ill that Trivier made during the same period were deliberately mixed with those of artists during the 2011 Parisian retrospective. Far from an attempt to oppose madness and genius, this juxtaposition was on the contrary an opportunity to question our gaze on these two fantasmatic poles of the human person.
While photographs by doctors such as those of Charcot in the 19th century emphasize the patients' illness and make them pose in ways that render their symptoms visible, those taken by Trivier do not seek to make the madman a simple witness to a pathology, nor even an "other," someone who would be characterized by his difference. As with his series on artists, Marc Trivier breaks away from the system of posing which is an artifice to reach the humanity of his subjects. These men have a powerful gaze and a strong presence that contradicts their anonymity.
Like the artists, whose mystery they seem to share, the "madmen" question our own presence.

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver gelatin print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his earlier portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "produces his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, dedicating several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, « Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière » in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work just as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "In boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, « Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier », Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple by nature, this intervention by the artist throughout the creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

« Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude. » ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouches, no cropping. We find in his work the same square format underlined by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence intensified by radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


« Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition. » ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifice, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light refers us to a real instant, to Barthes's "that has been" (Camera Lucida, 1980):


« De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie. » ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, this is perhaps what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

« La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là. » ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We only fix what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)


Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet ... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and slaughterhouses which he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris dedicated an important retrospective to him in 2011.

The photographs of the insane that Trivier made during the same period were deliberately mixed with those of artists during the 2011 Parisian retrospective. Far from an attempt to oppose madness and genius, this juxtaposition was on the contrary an opportunity to question our gaze on these two phantasmatic poles of the human person.
While photographs by doctors like those of Charcot in the 19th century emphasize the illness of patients and make them pose in a way to make their symptoms visible, those taken by Trivier do not seek to make the madman a simple witness to a pathology, nor even an "other," someone who would be characterized by his difference. As with his series on artists, Marc Trivier breaks away from the system of posing which is an artifice to reach the humanity of his subjects. These men have a powerful gaze and a strong presence that contradicts their anonymity.
Like the artists, whose mystery they seem to share, the "madmen" question our own presence.

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver gelatin print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not print new copies of his earlier portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "produces his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, dedicating several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, « Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière » in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work just as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "In boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, « Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier », Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple by nature, this intervention by the artist throughout the creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

« Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude. » ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouches, no cropping. We find in his work the same square format underlined by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence intensified by radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


« Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition. » ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifice, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light refers us to a real instant, to Barthes's "that has been" (Camera Lucida, 1980):


« De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie. » ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, this is perhaps what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

« La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là. » ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We only fix what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)


Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet ... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and slaughterhouses which he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris dedicated an important retrospective to him in 2011.

The photographs of the insane that Trivier made during the same period were deliberately mixed with those of artists during the 2011 Parisian retrospective. Far from an attempt to oppose madness and genius, this juxtaposition was on the contrary an opportunity to question our gaze on these two phantasmatic poles of the human person.
While photographs by doctors like those of Charcot in the 19th century emphasize the illness of patients and make them pose in a way to make their symptoms visible, those taken by Trivier do not seek to make the madman a simple witness to a pathology, nor even an "other," someone who would be characterized by his difference. As with his series on artists, Marc Trivier breaks away from the system of posing which is an artifice to reach the humanity of his subjects. These men have a powerful gaze and a strong presence that contradicts their anonymity.
Like the artists, whose mystery they seem to share, the "madmen" question our own presence.

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Unsigned original silver gelatin print, as with most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists who, despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not create new prints of his earlier portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "produces his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, « Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière » in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, « Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier », Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is by essence multiple, this intervention by the artist throughout the entire creative process gives an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

« Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude. » ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are neither retouchings nor reframings. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of posing. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


« Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition. » ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, delivered from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "that-has-been" (Camera Lucida, 1980):


« De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie. » ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps that's what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

« La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là. » ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' One fixes only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)


Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the mentally ill and slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from The International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris dedicates an important retrospective to him in 2011.

The photographs of the mentally ill that Trivier created during the same period were deliberately mixed with those of artists during the Parisian retrospective of 2011. Far from an attempt to oppose madness and genius, this juxtaposition was instead the occasion for questioning our gaze upon these two fantasmatic poles of the human person.
While the photographs of doctors like those of Charcot in the 19th century emphasize the illness of patients and make them pose in ways to render their symptoms visible, those taken by Trivier do not seek to make the madman a simple witness to a pathology, nor even an "other," someone who would be characterized by their difference. As with his series on artists, Marc Trivier steps outside the system of posing which is an artifice to reach the humanity of his subjects. These men have a powerful gaze and a strong presence that contradicts their anonymity.
Like the artists, whose mystery they seem to share, the "madmen" question our own presence.

Original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Unsigned original silver gelatin print, as with most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists who, despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not create new prints of his earlier portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "produces his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, « Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière » in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, « Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier », Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is by essence multiple, this intervention by the artist throughout the entire creative process gives an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

« Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude. » ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are neither retouchings nor reframings. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of posing. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

« Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition. »

["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).


It is also this light, delivered from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "that-has-been" (Camera Lucida, 1980):

« De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie. »

["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps that's what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

« La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là. » ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' One fixes only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the mentally ill and slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from The International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris dedicates an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his era that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken from the front, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

« (...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes. »

["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. Perhaps he awaits more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, « Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier », Marges 2004).




Photographed in their personal universe, most of the time their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The imbalance that results reveals the fragilities of these strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

« Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage. »

["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs could also be someone? Making a portrait is reuniting the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).


More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The presence of the photographer is perceptible in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

« Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre. »

["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone in the process of taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned gelatin silver print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original gelatin silver proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work just as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident." ["In the boxes, the prints buckle, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially a multiple medium, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are neither retouches nor cropping. We find in his work the same square format underlined by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of posing. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes's "that has been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We fix only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the mentally ill and slaughterhouses which he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris devotes an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his era that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken head-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. Perhaps he waits for more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chairs. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier" ["An image of fatigue in Marc Trivier"], Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait is reuniting the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The photographer's presence is perceptible in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned gelatin silver print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original gelatin silver proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work just as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident." ["In the boxes, the prints buckle, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially a multiple medium, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are neither retouches nor cropping. We find in his work the same square format underlined by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of posing. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes's "that has been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We fix only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the mentally ill and slaughterhouses which he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris devotes an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his era that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken head-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. Perhaps he waits for more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chairs. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier" ["An image of fatigue in Marc Trivier"], Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait is reuniting the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The photographer's presence is perceptible in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver print, like most of Trivier's works.
Tape repair marks and white portion torn in places.
Precious original silver print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, dedicating several days of work to each, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about the multiple, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouching, no reframing. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the makeup of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we are not facing the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, welcoming beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "that has been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declining from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We only fix what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris dedicates an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his time that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken face-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his method: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. He perhaps waits for more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier" ["An image of fatigue in Marc Trivier"], Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The imbalance that results reveals the fragilities of these such strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait is re-welding the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The presence of the photographer is felt in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone in the process of taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his old portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, dedicating several days of work to each, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about the multiple, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouching, no reframing. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the makeup of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we are not facing the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, welcoming beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "that has been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declining from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We only fix what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris dedicates an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his time that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken face-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his method: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. He perhaps waits for more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier" ["An image of fatigue in Marc Trivier"], Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The imbalance that results reveals the fragilities of these such strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait is re-welding the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The presence of the photographer is felt in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone in the process of taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver gelatin print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his older portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he hangs them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident." ["In the boxes, the prints buckle, but it doesn't matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-faces of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about multiples, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process gives an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, every thing, every being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouching, no cropping. In his work we find the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the makeup of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we are not facing the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of posing. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifice, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "ça a été" ["that has been"] (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We only fix what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist also takes interest in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the alienated and slaughterhouses which he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from The International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris devoted an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his era that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken face-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. Perhaps he is waiting for more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier" ["An image of fatigue in Marc Trivier"], Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait is rewelding the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The presence of the photographer is perceptible in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone in the process of taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver gelatin print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his older portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he hangs them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident." ["In the boxes, the prints buckle, but it doesn't matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident."] (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier" ["The inescapable face-to-faces of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially about multiples, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process gives an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude." ["In his cosmogony, every thing, every being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude."] (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouching, no cropping. In his work we find the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the makeup of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared, we are not facing the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of posing. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition." ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifice, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "ça a été" ["that has been"] (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie." ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers."] (Marc Trivier).

"La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là." ["Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We only fix what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there."] (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist also takes interest in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the alienated and slaughterhouses which he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from The International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris devoted an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his era that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken face-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. Perhaps he is waiting for more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier" ["An image of fatigue in Marc Trivier"], Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait is rewelding the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The presence of the photographer is perceptible in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone in the process of taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

Set of 8 small-format portraits of Michel Foucault by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his old portraits; the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he hangs them in stainless steel frames of his own making, allowing free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work just as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when exposed: "In boxes, the prints buckle, but what does it matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier", Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple by nature, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.

"In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude." (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouches, no reframing. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the makeup of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:

"Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance." (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "that-has-been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):

"From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers." (Marc Trivier).

"Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We only fix what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there." (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet ... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from The International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris devoted an important retrospective to him in 2011.



The photographs of the great personalities of his time that Marc Trivier makes do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken face-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. He perhaps waits for more natural behavior. And we find ourselves face to face with Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images." (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier", Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these such strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"I was reading Genet; for me Genet, it was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait, it's rewelding the name and the face. " (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The photographer's presence is perceptible in each of the portraits that Trivier makes:

"What interested me, it wasn't simply to photograph a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone in the process of taking a photo of someone else." (Marc Trivier).

Large original black and white photograph by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his old portraits; the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he hangs them in stainless steel frames of his own making, allowing free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work just as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when exposed: "In boxes, the prints buckle, but what does it matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier", Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple by nature, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.


"In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude." (Luc Desbenoit).


The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are no retouches, no reframing. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the makeup of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


"Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance." (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).


It is also this light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "that-has-been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):


"From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers." (Marc Trivier).

"Photography says only one thing: 'It was.' We only fix what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there." (Marc Trivier)



Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet ... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from The International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris devoted an important retrospective to him in 2011.
The photographs of the insane that Trivier made during the same period were deliberately mixed with those of artists during the 2011 Paris retrospective. Far from an attempt to oppose madness and genius, this juxtaposition was instead the occasion for questioning our gaze on these two fantasmatic poles of the human person.


The series devoted to slaughterhouses might seem distant from Trivier's other works. However, like the insane, slaughterhouses are part of these shameful images of a marginality that we do not want to see. It is a place rejected outside the city, far from gazes, far from men. There are moreover almost never men in these photographs.
Contrary to Franju's film, Le Sang des bêtes, in 1949, Trivier is not interested in the gesture of work in slaughterhouses. He captures them empty, populated by cadavers or animals blinded before being led to death. The photographer draws inspiration from Bacon's painting, whom he moreover photographed in 1981, and from the latter's relationship to the body. We find all the pity of the English painter for meat and animals in Trivier's series.


"I have always been very touched by images relating to slaughterhouses and meat, and for me they are closely linked to everything that is the Crucifixion... It's certain, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go to a butcher, I always find it surprising not to be there, in the place of the animal... " (Francis Bacon in Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, by Gilles Deleuze).


His photos show us beasts as martyrs like Marsyas or Saint Peter. Trivier reveals the tragedy of the body dispossessed of presence, photographing blind, dead, butchered animals drained of their entrails that black and white changes into marble. But it is always man who is reflected in these portraits of flesh without souls, a man who, through Marc Trivier's silver mirror, projects himself into this blind flesh, and crosses for an instant the infinitesimal space of the gaze that separates them.


"The cows regularly photographed by Marc Trivier at the Anderlecht slaughterhouse manifest the same essence as his human faces." (Henri Van Lier "Le timbre photonique, Robert Frank et Marc Trivier", in les cahiers de la photographie 1992)

Large original black and white photograph by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver gelatin print, as with most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his earlier portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work just as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier," Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process gives an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.


"In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude." (Luc Desbenoit).


The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are neither retouching nor reframing. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared we are not facing the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiant and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


"Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, the latter only welcoming beings - men, trees or beasts - by burning them, before disappearance."" (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).


It is also light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "it has been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):


"From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, varied from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers." (Marc Trivier).

"Photography only says one thing: 'It was.' We only fix what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there." (Marc Trivier)



Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and the slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris devotes an important retrospective to him in 2011.
The photographs of the insane that Trivier made in the same period were deliberately mixed with those of artists during the 2011 Paris retrospective. Far from an attempt to oppose madness and genius, this juxtaposition was on the contrary the occasion for questioning our gaze on these two phantasmatic poles of the human person.


The series devoted to slaughterhouses might seem distant from Trivier's other works. However, like the insane, slaughterhouses are part of these shameful images of a marginality that we do not want to see. It is a place rejected outside the city, far from gazes, far from men. There are moreover almost never men in these photographs.
Unlike Franju's film, Le Sang des bêtes, in 1949, Trivier is not interested in the gesture of work in slaughterhouses. He captures them empty, populated with corpses or animals blinded before being led to death. The photographer draws inspiration from Bacon's painting, whom he moreover photographed in 1981, and from the latter's relationship to the body. We find all the English painter's pity for meat and animals in Trivier's series.


"I have always been very moved by images relating to slaughterhouses and meat, and for me they are closely linked to all that is the Crucifixion... It's certain, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go to a butcher's, I always find it surprising not to be there, in the animal's place..." (Francis Bacon in Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, by Gilles Deleuze).


His photos show us beasts as martyrs like Marsyas or Saint Peter. Trivier reveals the tragedy of the body dispossessed of presence, photographing blind, dead animals, dismembered and emptied of their entrails that black and white turns to marble. But it is always man who is reflected in these portraits of soulless flesh, a man who, through Marc Trivier's silver mirror, projects himself into this blind flesh, and for an instant crosses the infinitesimal space of the gaze that separates them.


"The cows regularly photographed by Marc Trivier at the Anderlecht slaughterhouse manifest the same essence as his human faces." (Henri Van Lier "Le timbre photonique, Robert Frank et Marc Trivier," in les cahiers de la photographie 1992)

First edition on current paper.
Signed autograph Bernard Vargaftig to his friends Eliane and Charles (Dobzynski): "... who know so deeply that the same words are never the same, except that I kiss them ..."
Nice copy.

First Edition printed with 219 numbered copies on Arches paper, ours one of the few hors commerce.
Autograph dedication dated and signed by Bernard Vargaftig to Eliane and Charles (Dobzynski).
Nice copy.

Sixth edition, after the first edition published without date in 1745. Edition consisting of two parts: Dissertation physique à l'occasion du nègre blanc and Variétés dans l'espèce humaine. The first text was initially published separately.
Contemporary full marbled blonde calf binding. Decorated smooth spine. Red morocco title label. All edges red. Cracks to joints. One restoration to lower joint at head. Good copy.
The arrival in Paris of an albino black man provided the author with the opportunity to present his theories on fortuitous variations that explain the birth of new varieties; these ideas prefigure and contain in embryo genetic theories. The second work is a refutation of current theories on embryonic preformation. Maupertuis demonstrates in these two works that he was a pioneer in the life sciences and an important milestone in the evolution of genetic and hereditary theories.
19th-century engraved bookplate: Bibliothèque de Villeneuve-Butel

Rare first edition not released commercially, with no mention of deluxe copies.
Half hazelnut morocco binding with corners, spine with four raised bands set with black fillets, marbled paper boards, marbled endpapers and pastedowns, top edge gilt, binding signed by Marcel Hugon.
As frontispiece, a portrait of the author on Japan tissue.
Handsome copy.

First edition.
A nice copy.

Original printed edition with small number of this reprint.
Autographed autograph dedication of the author from Jean Lescure to Pierre Dumayet.
Pleasant and rare copy.

first edition.
Bibliography in-fine.
Pleasant copy.

first edition, one of the 237 copies numbered on rag, only print after 12 BFK Rives.
Illustrated book of 13 engraved wooden plates as well as vignettes by Abram Krol.
Precious autograph signed by Abram Krol to Jacques Hébertot presenting his wishes for the new year.
Beautiful copy.

Autograph signed letter to Denise Rollin: “As if the truest love could
only be matched with the inconvenience of everything”
Autograph letter signed by Georges Bataille to Denise Rollin, 18 lines in black ink.
Letter of a passionate love during the war. Georges Bataille is in Paris where the German offensive is in full swing: “[...] the German attack begins again.”

But this destruction does not reach Bataille's loving exaltation, on the contrary: “Sometimes I think that it is as if there was something more violent and terrible between you and me because we found ourselves in the middle of such a great turmoil. As if the truest
love could only be matched with the inconvenience of everything.”
The writing has an almost magical quality of incarnation: “By writing this to you, it is as if everything opened up between you to me and in such a way that whatever is alive there could laugh at everything.” Coupled with imagination and the strength of feelings, it is possible to overcome absence: “[...] suddenly you are there beside me, it is as if the distance was powerless to separate us.” Bataille tries to reassure his correspondent: “But under no circumstances must you worry about me. I will meet you again tonight at nine o'clock.” He ends his letter by asking her: “Give little Laurence a big kiss and tell her that I will write to her tomorrow.” Laurence is the daughter that Georges Bataille had with Sylvia Bataille, his first wife. At the time of this letter, she was in Vézelay with Denise Rollin, in this blended family that also includes Jean, the son that Denise had with her husband. Evidence, if needed, of the author's claims of the Bataille-Rollin couple's sexual and moral freedom, which was still rare at the time.


Although Bataille's life as a writer is well known in these years, little is known about his private life. And it is not the least paradox of his very revealing work that it only tells the minimum of his private affairs, and usually the worst of it.” (M. Surya, G. Bataille, la mort à l'œuvre). When Georges Bataille met Denise Rollin in 1939, he had just lost his lover Colette Peignot to tuberculosis. His friends had abandoned him and war had just been declared. This sentimental and social chaos however, does not affect Bataille as much as the tumultuous relationship he took up with Denise Rollin who was a friend of Cocteau, Breton, Prévert and a muse of painters Kisling and Derain. Their romance lasted four years and left very few details of their sentimental life during this period of Occupation, except what Bataille is willing to tell us in his novel Le Coupable (The Guilty) partly inspired by this passionate and painful relationship.

In a 1961 interview, Bataille looked back on this time: "Le Coupable is the first book that gave me a kind of satisfaction, an anxious one at that, that no book had given me and that no book has given me since. It is perhaps the book in which I am the most myself, which resembles me the most... because I wrote it as if in a sort of quick and continuous explosion." The letters addressed by Bataille to Denise during this period contain the seeds of the feelings that explode in Le Coupable as in all of Bataille's work. His writing is an ebb and flow of love and suffering, between ecstasy and disappointment, calm and energy, mixing familiar and formal tones, compliments and reproaches. The letters are often impossible to date with precision as they all proceed from the same movement of ecstatic flagellation.


In 1943, Georges Bataille found a house in Vézelay where the couple settled with Laurence (Georges and Sylvia's daughter), and Denise's son Jean. It was there that Bataille completed his book Le Coupable as well as his love story since barely a month after their arrival, Diane Kotchoubey, a young woman of 23, moved in with them. Before the end of the year, Bataille left Denise Rollin for this new flame.


These previously unknown letters were kept by Bataille's best friend Maurice Blanchot who from 1944 became the new lover Denise Rollin, this woman with a "melancholic and taciturn" beauty who "embodied silence". The crumpled letters (one is even torn into five pieces) are as much the precious trace of Bataille's extraordinary passion as they are a valuable source from a little-known period of his intimate life which was until then only perceived through the eyes of his friends. Above all they are of an exceptional literary quality and reveal several sides to him: the man, the accursed, the worshipper and the profaner... all that, according to Michel Foucault, makes Georges Bataille "one of the most important writers of this century”.

Autograph letter from Georges Bataille to Denise Rollin, 14 lines in black ink and pencil.
This letter, from the amorous correspondence that Bataille addressed to Denise Rollin during the war and Occupation, contains in embryo the feelings that explode throughout Bataille's entire work. Incessant ebb and flow of love and suffering, of ecstasy and disappointment, of calm and energy, mixing familiar and formal address, compliments and reproaches, this letter resembles its author and the era: « Comment pouvez-vous être assez aveugle pour ne pas voir le mal que vous me faîtes en vous laissant aller au premier caprice venu ? Que je le veuille ou non, une vie ne peut pas dépendre de caprices vides de sens. » ["How can you be blind enough not to see the harm you do me by giving in to the first whim that comes along? Whether I want it or not, a life cannot depend on meaningless caprices."]
The relationship was turbulent, both protagonists passionate. In his work Le Coupable, he summarizes the throes of amorous passion: "Love has this requirement: either its object escapes you or you escape it. If it did not flee from you, you would flee love. Lovers find themselves on condition that they tear each other apart. Both thirst to suffer. Desire must in them desire the impossible. Otherwise, desire would be satisfied, desire would die." Thus Bataille, in love, suffers: « Je n'ai même plus le courage de vous dire ce que je souffre : en tout cas imposer une pareille souf­france à un homme exactement pour rien, cela devient comme une maladie, comme un délire. » ["I no longer even have the courage to tell you what I suffer: in any case, to impose such suffering on a man for exactly nothing, it becomes like an illness, like delirium."] Was Denise Rollin showing herself cruel or was Bataille needlessly anguished? The fact remains that he shows himself weary of these agitations: « Je ne sais pas comment j'ai trouvé moyen d'espérer malgré tout, jusqu'ici. » ["I don't know how I found the means to hope despite everything, until now."]

Autograph letter signed by Georges Bataille to Denise Rollin, 25 lines in black ink on one leaf.
The first letter Bataille sends to Denise Rollin after her departure for Vézelay. Bataille remains in Paris as he is employed at the Bibliothèque nationale which does not close during the war. The separation has just occurred but Bataille hastens to write: « J'ai hâte de mettre la lettre à la poste, elle vous suivra de très près, comme tout ce que je suis voudrait vous suivre partout. » ["I am eager to post this letter, it will follow you very closely, as all that I am would wish to follow you everywhere."] To reassure her, he seeks in events signs of good omen: « La sirène que vous avez entendue à l'instant même où nous avons été séparés l'un de l'autre annonçait une fin d'alerte. D'abord j'ai été déprimé par une coïncidence désarmante
mais quand j'ai su que c'était la fin de l'alerte je me suis pris au contraire à espérer. » ["The siren you heard at the very moment we were separated from each other was announcing the end of an alert. At first I was depressed by a disarming coincidence but when I learned it was the end of the alert I began on the contrary to hope."]
In this separation, though essential, words are poor to express Bataille's distress: « Mais combien c'est dur de me sentir ainsi tout à coup arraché à vous, de ne plus rien pouvoir vous dire, d'être réduit à cette lettre. » ["But how hard it is to feel myself thus suddenly torn away from you, to no longer be able to say anything to you, to be reduced to this letter."] He seeks to make Denise understand the frustration that inhabits him: « Je voudrais que cela soit si transparent entre nous et si ardent en même temps que lorsque vous tou­cherez ce papier ce soit comme si nous nous tou­chions. » ["I would wish this to be so transparent between us and so ardent at the same time that when you touch this paper it would be as if we were touching each other."] He wishes to rediscover that closeness they both experienced: « Comme j'ai été près de vous dans la voiture tout à l'heure, presque comme jamais : je suis sûr que c'était la même chose pour vous. » ["How close I was to you in the car just now, almost as never before: I am sure it was the same for you."]

BATAILLE Georges. Autograph letter, signed, to Denise Rollin: “Cela me déchire toujours de me séparer de vous.” “It always tears me up to part from you.”
N. d. (1943), 13,5 x 20,8 cm, 2 pages on a single leaf
Autograph letter signed from Georges Bataille to Denise Rollin, 46 lines in black ink to one leaf, dampstain to upper right, not touching text.
The majority of the letter is given over to the search for a house in Vézelay: “I've already seen a house and an apartment.” In 1943, Georges Bataille had the idea of renting a house in Vézelay where the couple could move in with Laurence, the daughter of Georges and Sylvia, and Jean (alias

Bepsy), Denise Rollin's son. The lovers had just parted: “It always tears me up to part from you. Yesterday I felt a terrible malaise. I'd hardly managed to come out of it when I realized that I had surely not come for nothing and that we would be able to settle here.”
To help Denise in his choice, he describes to her the various advantages and inconveniences of the two places: “The house is really good, but sadly has one serious downside: the garden ends in a low wall onto which Jean could climb and fall down the other side, which is lower. We look out over the countryside from high up and far off into the distance. The garden is pretty, the interior a little sad and dilapidated. The apartment isn't bad but it doesn't have a garden and no view of the countryside either.” The couple took great pains in choosing the ideal place to bring together their patched-up family. There was even a suggestion of bringing Sylvia Bataille and Jacques Lacan to live in Vézelay as well.
Bataille is unsure about the apartment: “[…] there's nothing else to rent other than what I've already seen”; this was perhaps intended for Jacques Lacan and Sylvia Bataille. Bataille and his ex-wife Sylvia separated in 1934 and she had found love with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whom she went on to marry in 1953.
After these questions of real estate, Bataille goes on worrying about another problem, food: “As for provisions, it's certainly hard, but all in all, one has to get by one way or another.” The Second World War was, in essence, at its turning point, and the Nazis – feeling their gains threatened, became even harsher. This, coupled with a rise in agricultural taxes, resulted in a shortage of food: “I say that we would surely find a way around the provisions problem in the sense that there is as much meat as you want. It's vegetables that are hard to find. You can get milk, but not butter. People say that here, if the Zervoses wanted to, they could help us get along nicely” Christian and Yvonne Zervos were important figures in the town of Vézelay, where they had bought a second home in 1937. He was the publisher of Cahiers d'art, in which Bataille had published, and she was the director of the gallery of the same name. At the start of the war, they decided to move there permanently and used the isolation of the property to hide their friends Paul Éluard and Nusch. The Zervoses were thus well established by the time of this letter and Bataille had been told by people in the area: “[…] they think that knowing the Zervoses will be a great advantage over people who come to settle here knowing no one.” But he doesn't seem to have taken advantage of this advice, no doubt dominated by his feelings and the editing of his work Le Coupable [Guilty]. Diane Kotchoubey's – Bataille's future lover – settling in Vézelay shortly after this letter sealed the fate of the Bataille-Rollin relationship. By the end of 1943, Bataille had left Denise Rollin for his new flame.

Fine and long autograph letter signed by Georges Bataille to Denise Rollin, unpublished, torn in five pieces not affecting readability, 34 lines in black ink on one leaf.
Both frequenting Parisian intellectual and artistic circles, Georges Bataille and Denise Rollin met during 1939. She was notably the friend of Cocteau, Prévert and Breton. Bataille described her thus in his notebooks for Le Coupable: « une illusion aussi fragile qui se dissiperait au moindre souci, au moindre relâchement de l'inattention. » ["an illusion so fragile that it would dissipate at the slightest worry, at the slightest relaxation of inattention."]
Few details remain about their relationship since Georges Bataille's private life, particularly during this period, is not well documented. The profound feelings that Denise Rollin provoked in Bataille appear in this letter: « Maintenant je n'aspire plus qu'à une chose c'est à vous prouver que je n'appartiens plus qu'à vous, que je suis rivé à vous [...] » ["Now I aspire to only one thing, which is to prove to you that I belong only to you, that I am bound to you [...] "] The absolute nature of this love is such that Bataille is ready for anything: « [...] que vous le sachiez à tel point que si je ne devais plus avoir d'autre moyen qu'une profanation pour vous le prouver, je ferais devant vous cette profanation. » ["that you know it to such a degree that if I were to have no other means than a profanation to prove it to you, I would commit this profanation before you."]
Yet he feels guilty: « Je ne peux pas parler de l'état auquel je suis arrivé, je suis trop agité. Je sens, j'espère que c'est absurde. J'ai honte même de tant souffrir et de vous ennuyer avec ma souffrance quand vous seule êtes malade. » ["I cannot speak of the state I have reached, I am too agitated. I feel, I hope it is absurd. I am even ashamed to suffer so much and to trouble you with my suffering when you alone are ill."] The previous year, he had lost his companion to tuberculosis. Helpless before illness, he admits: « [...] moi je ne peux pas vous guérir, je ne peux même pas vous soigner [...] » ["I cannot cure you, I cannot even care for you [...] "] Only Denise Rollin would be capable of soothing him: « Tout était noir auparavant [...] ce que je souffre et que vous pouvez si facilement guérir chaque fois que vous le voudrez [...] » ["Everything was dark before [...] what I suffer and which you can so easily cure whenever you wish [...] "].
Abandoned to the throes of anguish, Bataille admits: « Je suis tellement fou en ce moment (et de cela je veux vous parler) que je ressens comme une complicité et une perfidie de tous pour me faire mal, comme si vous vous prêtiez au jeu pour que je sois encore plus désespéré [...] » ["I am so mad at this moment (and I want to speak to you about this) that I feel like a complicity and perfidy of everyone to hurt me, as if you were lending yourself to the game so that I would be even more desperate [...] "] On the verge of paranoia, he begs Rollin: « La seule chose dont je veux vous supplier [...], c'est de ne plus douter sans cesse de moi comme vous l'avez fait. » ["The only thing I want to beg of you [...] is to no longer constantly doubt me as you have done."] Yet he understands: « [...] il y avait en moi et dans mon passé de quoi vous paraître insupportable [...] » ["there was in me and in my past enough to seem unbearable to you [...] "] He offers her a solution: « Ce qui m'apaiserait le plus si vous m'écriviez, ce serait que vous me disiez que vous me croyez, que vous voulez bien que je sois votre chose. » ["What would soothe me most if you were to write to me would be for you to tell me that you believe me, that you are willing for me to be your thing."]

Autograph letter-card signed by Guy de Maupassant to Countess Potocka, 19 lines in black ink, on letterhead "GM 83, rue Dulong".
Published in Marlo Johnston, "Lettres inédites de Maupassant à la comtesse Potocka", Histoires littéraires, n°40, October-November-December 2009.
Maupassant was part of the circle of suitors of Countess Potocka whom she had nicknamed the "Macchabées". The author was much in social demand and this created scheduling problems for him: "Or, voici le cas [...] Legrand m'avait recommandé de ne pas m'engager [...] à ce dîner en m'annonçant une invitation de sa belle-soeur, invitation qui n'est pas venue." ["Now, here is the case [...] Legrand had recommended that I not commit [...] to this dinner by announcing an invitation from his sister-in-law, an invitation which never came."]
He decides to clear up the doubt by going to his friend Georges Legrand's: "prendre le vent." ["to test the waters."] A close friend of Maupassant's, it was he who introduced him to Countess Potocka. The author would dedicate to him in 1884 the short story Suicide, reprinted in the volume Les Soeurs Rondoli and which had previously been published in the magazine Le Gaulois.
Maupassant seems more anxious about visiting Potocka whom he had nicknamed "présidente" ["president"] and whose "conscience [le] préoccupe. Je m'efforcerai de bien la diriger." ["conscience worries [him]. I shall endeavor to guide it well."] He refers to the creation of the "Société religieuse Coopérative sous la dénomination de Société Anonyme Anti-Soporifique pour la Récréation perpétuelle de la comtesse Potocka" ["Religious Cooperative Society under the name of Anti-Soporific Anonymous Society for the perpetual Recreation of Countess Potocka"], one of the many games that took place during evenings at Countess Potocka's. Before leaving her, he reiterates his admiration: "Je suis aux pieds de ma présidente." ["I am at the feet of my president."]

Provenance: Jean Bonna collection.

First edition, one of 101 numbered copies on Ingres paper, the only copies after 1 Chiffon and 21 pur fil.
Work illustrated with drawings by Colette Deblé.
Handsome copy complete with its crystal reproducing the author's identity photograph.

first edition printed with 220 numbered copies on vellum of Arches paper, ours one of the 20 hors commerce.
autograph dedication of the author an autograph signed by Willy-Paul Romain to Pierre (Dumayet): "For you, dear old Pierre, and for Francoise, wishing that you would like the text, at least this beautiful presentation.
Book illustrated with 3 original lithographs by Liliane Marco.
Handwritten signatures of Willy-Paul Romain and Liliane Marco on the page following the justification of the draw.
Pleasant complete copy of its case in full orange canvas.

first edition printed at 125 copies numbered and justified by the author on Arches paper , ours printed specially for André Lebey , very close friend and collaborator of Pierre Louÿs.
Slight scratches without gavity at the head of the flat first, some small foxing on the guards.

first edition.
Binding of the publisher in full brown canvas, smooth back, guards and brown paper tops.
Autographed and signed dated and signed by Marcel Béalu to Paul Aveline: "... forever friend, these memories of meditations ..."
Pleasant copy.
.

first edition entirely out of trade and printed with 25 numbered copies.
Signed autograph signed by Violette Leduc: "... in remembrance of Italy and Spain too." With my friendship, January 24, 1956. Violette Leduc, the name of the dedicatee was cleanly scratched.
Our copy is enriched with an engraved portrait of Violette Leduc embellished with a handwritten precision of Jacques Guérin.
Very rare work consisting of the facsimile of the autograph manuscript and presented under a shirt in floral and lace-patterned wallpaper, title tag sticking on the first flat.
Pleasant copy.

Italian scene: animated seaside with square tower

Original pencil drawing showing an animated seaside scene.

Modern black wooden frame.

A drawing done during the journey the artist undertook with Sade in 1776.

Jean-Baptiste Tierce (1737-1794), who studied at the School of Fine Arts in Rouen and subsequently at the Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris, quickly built a reputation as a landscapist for his views of the South of France and Italy. His paintings are in the Uffizi in Florence and several French museums. When, in December 1775, Sade left Rome for Naples, he was welcomed by the son-in-law of his friend Dr. Mesny, Jean-Baptiste Tierce, who at the time was working on commissions for Cardinal de Bernis. He found lodgings for the Marquis who “intends to see everything [of the region], learn everything, judge, admire, critique, love, hate, in short give himself over to the insatiable and passionate curiosity that takes him to museums, galleries, churches, palaces and libraries as well as grottoes, caves, catacombs, and right down to the very innards of volcanoes. He was not content merely to look at the various works of art and ancient and modern monuments; he also set out to observe the local mores, politics, religion, administration, and social life. The beauty of the women, the local traditions, the quality of plays, table manners, and the way people drank, dressed, prayed, and made their way in the world all interested him. He wanted to take in both the present and the past of this culture, to encompass it all in a unique and universal vision. A massive undertaking to match his extraordinary imagination which he was, however, unable to fulfil, it being impossible for him to do so.
This was, however, the nature of his central ambition as a writer: grandiose and outsized. With a view to this “great work”, Sade took hurried notes, at the side of the road or in hostelries, which he then complemented with notes from his correspondents Mesny and Iberti. Thus, he built up the monument he intended to put before the public, but which did not end up seeing the light of day until the 20^th century.

Jean-Baptiste Tierce was a close collaborator: he re-read Sade's notes and gave his observations on the little notebooks, with numbers referring to the works mentioned. Sade took the greatest notice of his views. Often, the painter accompanied him on his rambles, sketchbook in hand, drawing the buildings and landscapes before them. A hundred or so of these drawings and watercolors were recently found in the Sade family archives. They give the Voyage en Italie the charm of a real travel diary.” (Maurice Levert, Sade, pp. 283-284).

Provenance : Sade family archives.

Original drawing in ink and watercolor depicting an animated seaside view with a village perched on a cliff.
Modern framing in blonde molding.
Drawing executed during the journey made with the Marquis de Sade during the year 1776.
Jean-Baptiste Tierce (1737-1794), student at the École des Beaux-arts in Rouen then at the Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris, quickly distinguished himself as a landscape painter for his views of the South of France and Italy. His paintings are preserved at the Uffizi in Florence and in several French museums. When in December 1775 Sade left Rome for Naples, he was welcomed by the son-in-law of his friend Doctor Mesny, Jean-Baptiste Tierce, who at that time was receiving commissions from Cardinal de Bernis. He found lodging for the Marquis "[who] intended to see everything [in the region], learn about everything, judge, admire, criticize, love, hate, in short to give free rein to that insatiable and passionate curiosity which led him into museums, galleries, churches, palaces and libraries, as well as into grottos, vaults, catacombs, and even into the bowels of volcanoes. He was not content to contemplate works of art, ancient or modern monuments; he also observed customs, politics, religion, administration, social life. The beauty of women, worldly customs, the quality of entertainments, ways of eating, drinking, dressing, praying, conducting oneself in society: nothing left him indifferent. He wanted to grasp all the present and all the past of this civilization, to embrace it entirely in a single and universal vision. A gigantic program, commensurate with his exceptional imagination, but which he could no longer fulfill, which was impossible for him to fulfill.
Yet such was his first ambition as a writer: grandiose, excessive. With this 'great work' in view, Sade hastily took notes, at roadsides or in inns, which he supplemented with the notes of his correspondents Mesny and Iberti. Thus was built this monument which he intended for the public, but which would not see the light of day until the 20th^th century.
Jean-Baptiste Tierce collaborated closely: he reread the notes and recorded his observations in small notebooks, with numbers referring to the works described. Sade took the greatest account of them. Often, the painter accompanied him on his excursions, his sketchbook in hand, drawing the buildings and landscapes before their eyes. About a hundred of these drawings and gouaches were recently found in the archives of the Sade family. They give the Journey to Italy the appearance of a true reportage." (Maurice Levert, Sade, pp. 283-284).
Provenance: archives of the Sade family.

Edition on current paper.
Signed autograph Claude Aveline Seignolle Paul: "... I do not send my books to those who deserve it ... Dixit my faithful friend Paul Aveline pen and heart ..."
O uvrage illustrated drawings in pencil Bruno Loisel.
Nice copy.

Edition printed in small numbers this reprint.
Signed autograph of Sarane Alexandrian Francis Spar: "... this study shows that Giacometti table will never be served."
Nice copy.

SADE Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de
Autograph letter to his wife. Hommages à la Présidente: “Faire noyer vive l'exécrable coquine qui depuis neuf ans [...] suce mon sang...” N. p. [Vincennes Castle] n. d. (circa 1781), 157 x 201 mm (6 3/16 x 7 15/16 ”), single leaf “The more I think about it, however, the more I think you have to have quite a nerve to dare write to a poor suffering unfortunate...”

Autograph letter unsigned from the Marquis de Sade to his wife. One page, closely written in ink on 31 lines.
This letter was written during Sade's imprisonment at Vincennes, probably in April 1781, if one is to believe the occasional indicators of date referenced by the writer. Sade mentions the end of his “exile from Marseilles”, referring to the decision of the court in Aix-en-Provence to overturn his conviction for debauchery and libertinage on the 14 July 1778, but which nonetheless banned him from living in or visiting Marseilles for three years. Sade also mentions one of the defining episodes of his life, his flight to Italy between January and November 1776: “they may as well have killed me straight off as left me in that foreign country where I was.” Sade also mentions the “amazing favor” that befell him of “moving house”, which is to say his potential transfer to the fort at Montélimar. In April 1781, Madame de Sade, through the good offices of her friend Madame de Sorans, got authorization from the King for her husband to be transferred to the prison there. Sade explains in the letter: “I think you have to have quite a nerve to dare write to a poor suffering unfortunate who has been beset these nine years...telling him to thank, ever so humbly, the woman who obtained for him the amazing favor of moving house.” Sade is here no doubt referring to the famous Madame de Sorans, a lady of Louis XVI's sister's bedchamber and a friend of his wife's who, out of a spirit of adventure, accepted the task of petitioning the King in his favor.
It was to Commissioner Le Noir, referenced in this letter, that Renée-Pélagie left the task of breaking the news to the prisoner: “Ah, I see now what this nice little visit by M. Lenoir means, I'm used to seeing him in the middle of my incarcerations.” Despite the fact that, as Pauvert points out in Sade vivant, this change of “house” occupied the Marquis' thoughts to a large extent, he was never actually moved, preferring to stay in the gaols of the keep at Vincennes. At this point, Sade had been imprisoned for several years and this letter, full of movement, reveals his thirst for freedom.
This letter was written when Madame de Sade withdrew to the convent at Sainte-Aure. If she saw this act as a liberation from the yoke of her marriage, the Marquis for his part was obsessed by the idea of his own liberation and mentions a potential date: October 1783. His long incarceration, which began in 1777, would last till April 1790, when lettres de cachet were abolished. Madame de Sade's visits were not reauthorized by the prison authorities until 13 July 1781, after four years and five months of separation.
Several important themes in Sade's correspondence already appear in this letter from his first years in prison. First of all, his hatred for his mother-in-law, the Présidente de Montreuil, an “execrable wretch who drinks [my] blood...disgraces [her] children, who has not yet done scattering her horrific deeds and platitudes” and whom he would like to “drown alive”. The Marquis also complains of his poor physical health: “my head spins and in my condition I hardly need any more misery”, using very Sadean epithets to express his despair. “A poor suffering unfortunate who has been beset these nine years”; “what have I done, what have I done dear Lord, to suffer for twelve years?”.
Provenance: family archives.

Handwritten letter to his wife. Sufferance and philosophy: “Punish as much as you like, but do not kill me: I did not deserve it [...] Ah! If you could read to the bottom of my heart, see everything that happens there, I think you would give up using it!”Handwritten letter from the Marquis de Sade addressed to his wife. One recto-verso leaf written in fine, tight writing. It has the partial date at the top “ce jeudi 17” “this Thursday 17th.”
Two slight signs of folding. The end of the letter was mutilated at the time, probably by the prison administration which destroyed the Marquis' licentious correspondence. So, several months later, in March 1781 his wife wrote to him: “My dear, you really must change your style so that your letters can reach me whole. If you give the truth, it offends, turns against you. If you give any untruths, they say: this is an incorrigible man, always with the same head that ferments, ungrateful, false etc. In any case, your style can only harm you. So change it.”
The letter was found as it was when, in 1948, the Marquis' trunk, that had been sealed by the family since 1814, was open and it was published in this reduced form in the correspondence of the Marquis de Sade.
Provenance: family archives.

This letter was written on 17 August 1780, during the Marquis' incarceration in Vincennes Prison. Following the umpteenth altercation with the prison guard, the right to go for a walk was taken away from him on 27 June and was not reinstated until 9 March the following year. The Marquis' physical and mental health is strongly affected by not being able to go out and he constantly begs Renée-Pélagie for the right to be quickly reinstated: “I urge you to let me get some fresh air: I absolutely cannot take it any longer.”
The suffering caused by these deprivations is a pretext for setting up a mechanism of guilt and blackmail with his wife: “There, three days that I have felt an awful dizziness, with blood rushing to my head so much so that I do not know how I have not fainted. One of these days, they will find me dead and you will be responsible, after having warned you as I do and having asked you for the help which I need to avoid it.”
Here, the Marquis is intentionally pulling on Renée-Pélagie's heartstrings, really putting her Christian values to the test and giving her the role of grand inquisitor: “You can grant me what I ask for, whilst keeping, on your signal, the same strength.”
We note, as in Tancrède's letter, a new appearance of “signal,” which masks completely different semantics.
An essential component of the Marquis' prison mindset, this encoded language, like the fantasised interpretations of his correspondents' letters, feeds the theories of researchers, philosophers, mathematicians... and poet biographers. As such, Gilbert Lely estimates that, far from being symptomatic of psychosis, the return to signals is “his psyche's defence reaction, a subconscious struggle against despair where, without the help of such a distraction, his motivation could have declined.” Missing from his correspondence during his eleven years of freedom, these enigmatic semantic depths, “a real challenge to semiological judgement” (Lever p.637), reappear in his Charenton diary.
This letter is also an opportunity for the Marquis to deploy his rhetorical panel, confronting the sadistic antonyms in the same sentence. “Pleasure” is synonymous with “abominable” “revolting,” “cemetery”and “garden” are superimposed, “I suffer” is conjugated as “I enjoy” and “softness” stands alongside “darkness.” The mastered practice of this eloquence exercise is united with the depths of Sadian thought: sufferance and pleasure are closely mixed, simultaneously endured, inflicted and desired. Through these associations, we glimpse the sensitive Manicheism of the Marquis's philosophical thought, which reaches its climax at the end of the letter, perfectly clear despite having a part missing: “Yes, I perceive evil, and I perceive that it is done; it is an inevitable perversity of man; but I only perceive when some pleasure...”
Yet the Marquis's status as a martyr is a real test of Sade's philosophy that justifies the suffering of others in the name of selfish pleasure.
In reality, despite the “black wickedness” of the “sublime arrangement” “sublime arrangement” to which he is subjected, Sade, far from denying his philosophy by experiencing it, does not claim a single part of the unwarranted pleasure, but the mere consideration of an “extreme need.” “Far from asking for pleasures,” on the contrary, the prisoner justifies the lack of expected satisfaction through a lengthily argument: “They only have to grant me a half hour and only three or four times per week, such a long time that I should have to be without it. I tell you that I will count all of this time, that is to say, the time since it was taken away from me and all the time when I only had half an hour, I will count, I tell you, all of this time as not having to go out at all.”
Also, this convoluted demonstration is essential to understand the Marquis's behaviour. At the hands of his jailers – and his wife – he makes himself a willing victim, only asking for “basic help”:
“Be sure that I am only asking for what is absolutely necessary and that I am suffering a thousand times more for having to ask than I enjoy what is granted to me.”
The letter uncovers an element as essential as it is unknown about the Marquis's personality. He is not content – following the example of the Sadian characters in his novels – to be the instigator of the defect, but he takes on the position of the victim to whom only the right – and the means – to live must be granted: “Punish as much as you like, but do not kill me: I did not deserve it”.
This demand is to be compared with his future novels, in which the vulnerable characters, victims of the most unspeakable tortures, are always granted a brief moment of respite during which their executioners suspend their punishment. These interruptions take the form of philosophical intervals, during which the torturers are the standard-bearers of Sadian ideas.
Therefore, it is not the Sade persecutor but a wounded captive who will draw on the heart of his prison sufferance to incite the punishments of the 120 Days of Sodom, as evidenced by this fantastic premonitory confession: “Ah! If you could read to the bottom of my heart, see everything that happens there, I think you would give up using it!”

First edition.

Contemporary full speckled brown sheep binding. Decorated spine with raised bands. Brown sheep title label. Headcap torn away. Loss to upper joint at head. Upper joint split at tail with loss. Library label at head. Corners very much bumped. 

Edition of wich no leading copies exists.
Signed autograph of Marcel Béalu Henri-Louis Mill and his wife Renée: "... that I will not forget in my prayers ..."
Tris spots in margins also affecting first flat, tapering in the following sheets.
complete copy of its peière insert.

First edition, one of 100 numbered copies on pur fil du Marais paper, ours unnumbered, the only deluxe copies.
Preface by André Breton.
Spine lightly sunned without severity, newspaper clipping attached which has left a shadow on the first endpaper, otherwise handsome copy.

first edition, one of 111 numbered copies, only large paper after 11 blue Auvergne.
Signed autograph of Marcel Béalu to a friend: "... amid the swirl of the river was the appointment ..."
Book illustrated with a drawing of Elie Lascaux.
spine and boards slightly and marginally insolated, a little lack head back.

[ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT] ANONYMOUS
Regla y Constitutiones de la Cofradia del Sanctissimo Sacramento
de la Yglesia de San Christoval de Granada
Autograph manuscript with three miniatures Manuscript on vellum, comprising 31 leaves: 50 pages of text, ruled and lined and 3 full-page miniatures in colours, heightened in gold. The four final leaves were numbered and partly ruled but left empty. Contemporary manuscript ex-libris on front endpaper. In Spanish throughout, written in Caroline minuscule on 24 lines, the text is very readable and very regular.

The manuscript begins with a three-page summary covering the 24 chapters that comprise the Regla y constitutiones de la cofradia del Sanctissimo sacramento de la yglesia de San Christoval de Granada.
One illuminated capital in red and blue, indents and pagination in red, small sketch in black ink to the inner margin. The verso of the final page of the summary has been ruled and lined in red but left blank. There follow the three full-page miniatures. The first shows a Communion scene (on the recto of one leaf), the second the Tree of Jesse (verso of the same leaf), and the third Saint Christopher bearing the baby Jesus (recto of the following leaf).
The verso of the miniature bears a short manuscript text explaining that these rules are those of the confraternity and brotherhood of the Holy Sacrament, established in the Church of Saint Christopher of Granada on the 1st of May 1568. This is followed by the “prohemio”, a prologue of two and a half pages in which the confraternity takes an oath; this starts with an imposing illuminated capital in red and blue. The chapters then follow on directly, each with a tidy initial. The important terms are heightened in red, allowing for quick navigation in the text. A long manuscript annotation to the outer margin of leaf 24. The aforementioned rules take up 23 ruled leaves, ruled and lined in red.
Leaf 27 bears two manuscript privileges. We have not been able to read the signature on the first, dated May 1569, though quite elaborate. The second, later, one (May 1596), is signed by Justino Antolinez de Burgos (1557-1637), at the time the Chaplain Royal, charged with the inspection of ecclesiastical lodges. Long contemporary manuscript note to reverse of leaf 24.
Contemporary light-brown calf, spine in five compartments with gilt fillets and fleurons, gilt fillet frame to boards, small gilt fleurons to corner and a larger gilt fleuron to centre of covers. One clasp preserved. A few very skilful repairs and regilding, practically invisible.

This manuscript has three spectacular full-page miniatures in gouache, heightened in gold.

The first shows the Holy Communion, with Christ himself establishing the Eucharist with the words “This is my body, this is my blood.” The Apostles and Jesus (with a halo) blessing them are seated around a table set with bread and fish. This motif became a major theme of Christian art in the Renaissance, as this miniature also shows.
The second miniature shows the Tree of Jesse, which symbolises the genealogy of Christ traced from Jesse (“Xese”), shown as an old man reclining. In keeping with the iconographic tradition, a tree protrudes from his side, the main branches of which bear some of Jesus's ancestors. Here, they are: Zachary, Jeremiah, David, an unidentified king, and – at the pinnacle – Mary holding the Christ child within a mandorla.
The third miniature presents a scene with Saint Christopher – the patron of the Church in Granada to which the Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament was attached – with a child on his shoulders, as he was commonly represented. The iconography derives from a passage in the Golden Legend in which St Christopher helps a small boy cross a river. During the crossing, the child gets heavier and heavier, and the river more and more threatening: “You have put me in the greatest danger. I do not think the whole world could have been as heavy on my shoulders as you were. The child replied: 'You had on your shoul
ders not only the whole world but Him who made it. I am Christ your king, whom you are serving by this work; and to prove to you that I am telling the truth, when you go back to the other shore, plant your stick in the ground opposite your house, and in the morning, you will see that it has flourished and borne fruit'.”
This miniature is bordered on all sides with richly illustrated borders on a golden ground, typical of mediaeval manuscripts, showing Sphinxes and several types of anthropomorphic plants.

These miniatures bear witness to the influence of the Italian Mannerist artists on Spanish painters. One sees here the same graceful serpentine in the figures, the same attention to drapery (especially in the Communion scene) and a very similar colour palette, with tones as delicate as they are vibrant.

Edition illustrated with original designs by Raymond Peynet engraved on wood by T. Schmied, one of 200 numbered copies on handmade rag paper.
Spine of the chemise discolored and foxing to the boards of the latter.
Handsome copy.

first edition printed in small numbers on laid Holland paper.
Signed autograph of Leo Riotor Gustave Coquiot.
Illustrated book, frontispiece, a sketch of Auguste Rodin.
The work and adventures, Rodin designer, characters and projects and comments by Leon Riotor.
A small bright spot in the top of the first flat, small marginal tear on the boards, nice interior state.

first edition printed in small numbers.
Precious autograph signed by Pierre Alexandre Boujut Vialatte.
A folding track Length of the second flat.
Rare.

First edition printed in 300 numbered copies on Arches.
Work illustrated, as frontispiece, with a portrait of the author engraved on lino.
Minimal spotting to the endpapers, handsome copy.

first edition printed in small numbers on Holland paper.
Signed autograph of the great bibliophile Pierre Bellanger Louis Barthou.
Rare copy and pleasant.

First edition.
Rare in its softcover, as issued.

SHEBBEARE John
Le Peuple instruit; ou Les Alliances dans lesquelles les Ministres de la Grande-Bretagne ont engagé la Nation, & l’emploi qu’ils ont fait de ses Escadres & de ses Armées, depuis le commencement des troubles sur l’Ohio, jusqu’à la perte de Minorque, considérés dans une Quatrième Lettre au Peuple d’Angleterre
N. n., n. p. 1756, 9 x 16,3 cm, (2) xxiv, 212 pp., contemporary calf
First edition, rare.
Contemporary light brown polished calf. Spine in decorated compartments. Red morocco title-piece. Upper joint with narrow crack to head. A very good and fresh copy.
An important document on the history of Canada and the United States. The work begins by looking at the causes of the conflict between Great Britain and France over the territory of Ohio. In essence, 1756 marked the beginning of the Seven Years’ War or French and Indian War, a war of conquest to establish the legitimate occupation of the territories. This war overran the territory from Virginia and Nova Scotia to the region of the Canadian lakes, with some American Indians fighting on the side of the British, and some on the side of the French. Shebbeare reviews the British defeats, mistaken policy and the generals in Canada, the intervention of American militias and Washington. The author frankly accuses the British government (Kings and Ministers) of having failed to protect the British colonies in America and predicts the downfall of Britain, giving examples of jealousy and misguided policy in Canada. As well as this accusation, the author examines the situation of Britain in Europe, the treaty with Russia, the difficulties of the House of Hanover and France and once again accuses his country of ruining itself with disastrous political decisions.

First mimeographed edition of this scurrilous pamphlet written by the Z.O.B. (Zénith Occulto Barbare) on the occasion of the centenary of Paul Claudel's birth.
The anti-Claudelian diatribe concluding with an invitation to violate the young girl Violaine.
Manuscript indication of the printing date of this document at the foot of the leaf and small tears to margins.
Rare and edifying document.

First edition, one of 10 numbered copies on colored paper, the only major paper.
Our copy is complete, like copies of the deluxe edition of the original collage by Jean-Benoît Thirion he signed.
Illustrated book two collages of the author.

New edition, after the first edition published in 1749. One portrait as frontispiece. Les réflexions sur l'exil has its own title page, in volume I, as does the Lettre à Mylord Bathurst in the second.
Contemporary full glazed blonde calf binding. Spine with raised bands decorated. Red morocco title and volume labels. 4 corners bumped, one trimmed. Volume II slightly worn at foot. Rubbing. Rather handsome copy.
Secretary of state, then English Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lord Bolingbroke was an influential statesman who experienced both notoriety and disgrace. He pursued a literary career alongside his political activities, beginning by contributing to the writing of the journal The examiner (against the Whig party). The 2 volumes gather the author's philosophical works, which would have a lasting influence on philosophers such as Pope or Voltaire, or even Mirabeau. His philosophy is inherited from Locke, and the author shows himself in his writings to be anti-clerical and anti-religious, but deist. In the second volume we find a historical work on the state of Europe before the Treaty of Utrecht, of which Bolingbroke was one of the architects.
Bookplate: Bibliothèque de Belay.

Original photograph. Vintage gelatin silver print in black and white. Artist's proof signed on verso.
Portrait of the writer Léo Malet.
In 1983, Bruno de Monès began a regular collaboration with Le Magazine littéraire that would continue until the mid-nineties.

First edition of this advertising booklet published on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Kléber company in Colombes and produced after the design by Jean Garcia.
Text by Jean Giono.
Each double page is illustrated in full-page color and opens with 2 pages of black and white photographs by Roger Catherineau and Michel Desmarteau.
Spine and boards lightly and marginally yellowed, handsome interior condition.