The Cliffs, reviewed in FOAM magazine #36

"After two influential books revered by a small circle of fans, French photographer Bertrand Fleuret vanished from the scene for some years. American independent press J&L Books, which has published some of my favourite titles, has now produced its second collaboration with Fleuret, a slim and unassuming book about a fleeting subject: a dream. Printed on black paper there is a brief text in which the photographer tells of his dream, seemingly balancing between an economical and pragmatic description and his wonder and doubt about what his mind might have been trying to tell him. All this is set against photographs and drawings illustrating his dream. The photographer has culled images from the web, used photographs from his archive, or taken new pictures. This all happens in some twenty pages, leaving the reader with the frustrated feeling you often get after dreaming, of having encountered a different dimension and being completely at loss to understand it. Fleuret’s work reaches towards the imaginary and tries to connect the inner eye to the camera and to convincingly move his project forward and taking us along with him."

Sebastian Hau.

Portfolio in FOAM magazine #23

The theme of this 23rd issue is City Life and I have a 16 pages portfolio of images taken from the city chapter of Landmasses and Railways. After the images comes a great text by Adam Bell: Notes for an eponymous city guide.

Other Photographers in this issue are Mohamed Bourouissa, Takashi Homma, Nontsikelelo Veleko, JH Engström, Otto Snoek, Reinier Gerritsen and Joel Sternfeld.

You can see it on FOAM's website here.

Adam Bell's website is here.

Landmasses and Railways, review in FOAM Magazine #18

"Bertrand Fleuret has published his second book at the small, Atlanta-based publisher J&L Books, and it’s another daring exploration of travel and mystery. It’s a medium-format book, comparable to his debut, in black-and-white, in which a cascade of images washes away most of what you’ve seen before. Surely Fleuret has his inspirations in photography (as diverse as Lee Friedlander and Moriyama Daido), but as listed most interestingly on his webpage, they also spring from literature and and graphic novels. The quote by Paul Bowles at the beginning hints at Fleuret’s intention to create from his travels (across Europe this time) a book that leads the viewer into an imaginery country, with five chapters from departure to the arrival at a garden (which turns out to be fields, meadows and scrub). One is guided on this journey by trusting Fleuret’s chain of associations, trusting his curiosity, and his Winogrand-like inquisitiveness as to what a camera can do and cannot. He seems to be straining to turn the camera into an idiosyncratic thing that doesn’t simply spit out rational, readable, nor poetical pictures, but rather images of mental and bodily experiences of travel, of displacing oneself, of falling and flying."

© Sebastian Hau and FOAM Magazine