The Eclipse

The Eclipse offers a panorama of analog black and white photographs from Stéphane Charpentier, taken over a decade in Greece, a country reflecting a world plunged into economic, political, and human crises. Beyond documentary or an intimate essay, The Eclipse suggests layered readings. The book combines poetic images of suffering humanity with an iconography at once symbolic and oneiric, quasi-metaphysical. Interludes of mosaics of prints evoke the density of contemporary chaos, while the final sequences open onto natural, virgin and dazzling spaces, from where at last, springs light.

The texts, in French and English, are transcriptions of recorded dialogs, a lingering sonic echo to this present, torn between struggle and hope.

Stéphane Charpentier carries out a poetic, existential photographic work in black and white film. His oeuvre is shaped through a long term process, working in France and internationally for nearly twenty years. He is represented by the Françoise Besson Gallery in Lyon. He also makes experimental movies and is the artistic curator of the collective project Temps Zero (image and sound).

His photography, somber and luminous, raw and stripped of any artifice of enticement, confronts us with the dualities between human relations and within ourselves. A photographer who reacts with an edgy hypersensitivity to the world, Stéphane Charpentier creates an oeuvre from darkness that bursts with incandescent clarity. (Caroline Bénichou)