La Fin de l’abondance

During the summer of 2022, the polemic swells around a formula of the President of the Republic: “the end of abundance”. The expression is on everyone’s lips, including mine, because I am in the process of liquidating 10 years of photographs in the 17 chapters of my next book, which suddenly finds its title.

Every 48 pages, the book takes up a theme, a fantasy or a contemporary fear (among which food shortages, global warming, the desertification of city centers) and opposes to it what we could qualify with Hito Steyerl as “poor images”, or at least images in the process of impoverishment. Between the pieces of this puzzle, a background noise is formed: that of social struggles, of the hopes of nightlife, of a life that seeks to reinvent itself.

The device of the book plays with the abundance of photographs, echoing the contemporary “supermarket of images”, but also interrogates the capacity of replacement of the real that we wanted to attribute to photography. Once compiled and standardized within a given framework, the image-objects produce another history by submitting to the rhythm of the paper, of the reading, of the material supports which welcome it. This book was thus made in the spirit of “the end of abundance” and its ramifications, alternating the use of three papers usually intended for industry, advertising, and literary publishing.