The Edition

Alongside a rich career working for major fashion and decoration magazines, one of the most renowned photographers of his generation has continuously captured the people, places, and objects that have marked a life full of encounters and travels. A hundred of these photographs, which the French artist has carefully preserved and cataloged, are the focus of the exhibition “Ne rien jeter, 33 ans après” (“Keep Nothing, 33 Years Later”) at the Gallifet Art Center in Aix-en-Provence.

It’s a very small stone Venus on a pedestal, shielding her modesty with her hand. She is called Venus Pudica. The gesture seems lifelike and resonates with the image of another antique piece, Fragment of Sarcophagus. Everything seems alive, and time feels light in “Ne rien jeter, 33 ans après”, the retrospective that the Gallifet Art Center—a sublime 18th-century mansion in the heart of Aix-en-Provence—dedicates to photographer François Halard. However, a retrospective was not initially in the mind of the 64-year-old artist when Stéphane Ibars, the exhibition curator and artistic director of the Collection Lambert contemporary art museum in Avignon, knocked on the door of his house in Arles. It is there that the photographer keeps, in boxes, the entirety of his photos since the first one he took at the age of 16 with a camera gifted by his parents, who were prominent antique dealers. That first photo was like his first form of expression, as he struggled with severe dyslexia and speech issues. Since then, he hasn’t stopped.

Until the 2000s, he was under contract with the American group Condé Nast, a remnant of a time when the press was wealthy. For prestigious magazines like Vogue, Vanity Fair, and House & Garden, he photographed fashion, the most beautiful homes, and sumptuous gardens. At the same time, as a counterbalance, he continued to engage with people, places, and objects. He met the artists who populate his imagination, entered their studios, and traveled the world. On the boxes where each photo is cataloged, numbered, and classified, names dance: Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Rome, Arles, Giorgio Morandi, Miquel Barceló, Louise Bourgeois… “Ne rien jeter” resonates as a life project. It’s a phrase this erudite collector borrowed from German philosopher Walter Benjamin.

With Stéphane Ibars, François Halard opened a forgotten box and found an image taken 33 years ago: the hand of Constantine in the courtyard of a museum in the Capitoline Hill, on which he had already painted. The photographer, who had just returned from Rome, realized he had taken a photo of the same hand again, without remembering he had done so before. “33 years later,” the idea for the exhibition was born, constructed as a journey where one looks in the rearview mirror to better show where one wants to go. This journey is about the freedom the photographer grants himself—the freedom to tear his photos, paint on them, damage them, let ink drip on them, or allow water to deteriorate them: “Less and less documentary, more and more abstract.” “I create almost daily. I put my images on the walls. I reinterpret them. I enlarge them. I make new prints. I always want to go further in this exploration and surprise myself,” he says with a mischievous voice.

The most recent images in this exhibition, which he himself curated with refined arrangement, were taken in Giverny. They showcase the water lily pond designed by Claude Monet. Originally Polaroids, he scanned, enlarged, and cropped them. He then made prints on which he painted with brushes and fingers. The result is singularly beautiful. The colors and light seem to dance, sometimes evoking a city at night, sometimes a powdered dawn. “I have always sought this ambiguity: not knowing whether it’s photography or painting, without falling into pictorialism.”

Meanwhile, along the journey, he takes visitors to Italy—to Cy Twombly’s home in Gaeta, northeast of Naples; to Villa Malaparte on the island of Capri; to Carlo Mollino’s home in Turin; to Giorgio Morandi’s studio in Bologna; to Julian Schnabel’s residence in New York; and to Robert Rauschenberg’s home in Florida. There’s also a series of flowers started in Arles during the lockdown: lilies, anemones, magnolias, peonies, irises, and the “last tulip,” dated 2024. In a room in the basement, François Halard has gathered his work accomplished in the exceptional ruins of Baalbek, in the northern Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, the ancient Heliopolis. Located in a region controlled by Hezbollah, this majestic complex of three monumental temples dedicated to Jupiter, Venus, and Bacchus (among the best-preserved relics of Greco-Roman heritage), with its almost pink reflections, could only speak to François Halard. His work is nourished by travels, encounters, stories, references, and images seen and sedimented: “When I photograph an artist, I always think of those who came before me. In Rome, I think of Piranesi’s engravings. At Morandi’s, there’s obviously a tribute to the photos taken by Luigi Ghirri.” This circle of influences is “like a family reunion.”