Signed Sophie Ristelhueber - Opérations - 2009

Exceptionally signed copy on the title page by Sophie Ristelhueber (born 1951), a unique original French edition and unavailable as a signed copy online. This book presents the entirety of Sophie Ristelhueber’s work up to the 2009 publication date. 448 pages and several hundred photographs in black and white and mostly in color, including more than a hundred in double-page spreads; the book also reproduces the photographs from the staging of her major exhibitions in various venues. Text in French by Bruno Latour and David Mellor, as well as numerous introductory texts to her successive works by Sophie Ristelhueber herself. Solid publisher’s binding, yellow cloth, and illustrated dust jacket. Copy in excellent condition, practically like new.

Sophie Ristelhueber’s photographic work has been shown around the world in major institutions, at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles, and in Paris at the Centre Pompidou - Musée national d’art moderne, at the Jeu de Paume (retrospective in 2009). (according to Le Figaro 11/08/2009). Sophie Ristelhueber is the 2025 Hasselblad laureate, one of the most prestigious international photography awards, and she was the star guest of Paris Photo 2025.

In her early landscape work for DATAR, Sophie Ristelhueber chose a structural and analytical approach to representing railway landscapes. “I had set myself a precise program including all types of landscapes visible from the railway: industrial, urban, of the low and high mountains, vineyards, sea, plain. By proceeding systematically, methodically, after visiting everywhere, I quickly noticed places where I had an interesting point of view” (Jean-François Seguin).

Since then, Sophie Ristelhueber has continued to reflect on territory and its history through a singular approach to ruins and ground-trace marks left by humans in places devastated by war or natural upheavals: “This mixing of elements from various territories—Armenia in 1989, Turkmenistan in 1997, Syria in 1999, Iraq in 2000, West Bank in 2003-2004—contributes to a vision of the chaos of history that haunts me since my work in Beirut in 1982.” In her book Beirut, Photographs (1984), she traced the history of collective violence from the 1970s to the consequences of the Beirut siege, highlighting traces left on the urban landscape, stony vestiges of disjointed events… a melancholy state of affairs manifested as “a modern city in ruins.” Beirut thus plays a role in Sophie Ristelhueber’s staging of time and civilization, of traces left on the old and the modern, of construction and demolition. With the means of photography, installation, and publishing, she seeks to lay bare the facts and the imprint of history, in bodies and landscapes, making visible wounds and scars, true memories of trauma.

Copy in excellent condition, practically like new. A personal collection copy carefully preserved. Shipping protected with reinforced packaging and insured international tracking. In case of multiple purchases, group shipping is possible with reimbursement of any excess postage paid via PayPal.

1.8 kg. excluding packaging.