25 boulevard Beaumarchais is Carole Bellaïche's flat. The one of her childhood and adolescence. For many years, this flat was the playground of this teenager, barely 14 years old, who began to take photographs at an age when others were concentrating on their own image. " That's where I started to photograph, where I learned about light, ambiances, direct light, backlighting, the staging of my models in every corner of the flat, perspectives, and where this passion for houses, places, which become settings, as if they belonged more to a world of fiction than to reality. " says Carole. This is where it all begins: she finds her models on high school benches, on the terraces of Parisian cafés and asks them to pose in the incredible photo studio that is the family flat. She tamed the light, experimented with black and white silver film, juxtaposed the juvenile and charismatic faces of the young girls against dark backgrounds from which emerged the antique furniture her mother had found and the mouldings
and made her prints in a small bathroom adjoining the bedroom adjacent to her older sister's bedroom. Between the comings and goings of friends and family, will come Emmanuelle Béart, Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy, Anna Karina, Anne Brochet, Tom Novembre, Charlélie Couture, Jacques Dutronc, François Cluzet, Dominique Issermann, Gabrielle Lazure, Aurore Clément, Francis Huster, Marie Trintignant, Jacques Bonnaffé and many others. All these actors were the starting point for the photographic work that Carole Bellaïche began a few years later. Placing filmmakers and actors in museums, she collaborated for many years with the mythical Cahiers du Cinéma. Some of them remember 25 boulevard Beaumarchais. Invited to recount how they experienced these atypical shoots conducted by a very young woman, they give intimate and sincere testimonies in this book. "This flat at 25 boulevard Beaumarchais was not just a beautiful flat, it was what we made of it. And we left it, forced, obliged. That was in August 1990. " concludes Carole Bellaïche. But of "this island, this kingdom", as she describes the flat, there remain mountains of discarded cardboard boxes in which are piled up black and white prints, some in colour, thousands of negatives, but above all nostalgia, friendship, love and the singular testimony of the birth of an extraordinary photographer.

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25 boulevard Beaumarchais, Carole Bellaïche

192 pages • Size 210 x 290 cm

ISBN : 978-2-493152-00-8

Prix : 42 € TTC

Release : October 2021

Distributed by Art & Paper - Saveca