© Sophie Ristelhueber/ADAGP, Paris, 2009

Sophie Ristelhueber, "Beyrouth, Photographies" (1984). Black-and-white gelatin-silver print, 9 x 7 in.

February 2009 Field Guide

Roni Horn

"Where in the World?"

Paper Cuts: 200 Years of Black Paper Dolls

Gedi Sibony

Charles Darwin

Dan Graham

"The Dirty Hands"

Yayoi Kusama

Year of Fashion

Isabelle Cornaro

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Santiago Sierra

Glenn Brown

The Face of Our Time

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

For the past 25 years, French photographer Sophie Ristelhueber has traveled to the world’s most dangerous and devastated locales to capture the aftermath of war and natural disaster. In Kuwait, Bosnia, Armenia, and Iraq — using both color and black-and-white, close-ups and aerial views — she produces work that often reads as abstract and unidentifiable, until you come close and realize that you are looking at the remains of carnage. For her 1991 series "Fait," taken after the first Gulf War, she avoided the now iconic spectacle of the flaming oil wells for the emptied desert littered with the detritus of battle: shell casings, hunks of deformed metal, shoes. For her 1994 series "Every One," she spent time in Paris hospitals, taking portraits of refugees from Bosnia and Rwanda, the grisly scars on their bodies evoking the bullet-spattered facades of apartment buildings in Beirut. This exhibition surveys her tremendously moving oeuvre, including her first film, Le Chardon (2007), which pairs quotes from Tolstoy with vertigo-inducing shots of a mountain range.

jeudepaume.org

"Sophie Ristelhueber" originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' February 2009 Table of Contents.