New York Notebooks

Jean-Christian Bourcart's images tell fragments of stories from contemporary world in a photographic writing which mixes investigation, experience personal and formal invention. "Bourcart does not speak only one language, but invents a new one which corresponds to each of his projects," Florian emphasizes Ebner. Transgressing all the rules of documentary photography, his The work immerses the viewer in the rustling of the world and offers a vision of it kaleidoscopic: tension, clandestinity, confrontation, saturation, movement, revelation, the gaze becomes filmic. In 2020, the photographer bequeathed his archives at the Nicéphore-Niépce museum. Among this collection, 48 research notebooks composed of 10 × 15 prints arranged in boards, which reveal the formal concerns of the author in their constancy and their variations. This "typological atlas" immerses us in the visual universe of Bourcart in linking its most famous series in the production flow general. Clandestine life in brothels, daily life in deprived neighborhoods from Camden – the most dangerous city in the United States – anonymous suburbs, ruins of the Wall Trade Center, urban wanderings... Bourcart photographs the crowds, solitude, traces of activity; he tracks and questions our presence in the world, aware that photography is a fiction based on the reality of life. Conceived as a facsimile of the original notebooks, this "Atlas", with its flow of more than 300 images, takes us into the photographer's imagination, revealing his obsessions, his recurrences and his fascination with the breaking down of barriers between forms of representation.