Collectionner les Tombes

Collectionner les tombes (Collecting Graves) presents a valuable photographic archive of funerary art from the 19th century to the present day. The book draws on the cemetery images of artist and collector André Chabot. For some fifty years, he has been compiling a meticulous inventory of tombs, sculptures, sepulchral chapels and other catacombs, photographed in over seventy countries.
Based on the photographer’s premise that “funerary art is a thing of the past”, and at a time when this aesthetic form is in danger of disappearing, Editions Païen invites readers to wander through this book as they would through the alleys of a cemetery, collecting the last remaining testimonies.
Collectionner les tombes is an invitation to discover a “vast global necropolis where you can linger over the most humble and moving tombs as well as the most grandiose and spectacular mausoleums”.

Text by
Sylvain Besson (Director of Collections, Musée Nicéphore Niépce)
Ambre Charpier (art critic and researcher at the Sorbonne)
Lia Pradal (direction and design of the book)

Photographs in appendices:
Marie Quéau