Every summer, from July to October, photography takes over Arles, a small town in the south of France. A numbered trail turns its landmarks into galleries: chapels, a cloister, the modern art museum, even a supermarket. Prestigious names mix with more confidential ones. This year, Charlotte Gainsbourg, who has spent decades in front of other people’s cameras, steps behind one with “5 Bis,” her first exhibition.
A famous name on the trail brings an audience, and raises questions. Can anybody be a photographer? Is she here only because of her name? Oh, a new hobby for the singer, actress and (nepo-)muse? Then you walk in, and the haters go quiet, because the work answers before you have finished asking. The difficulty is that she is photographing her own ghosts. Her subject is her father’s house, which means every frame risks being received as a relic rather than as an image, a souvenir of Serge rather than a picture by Charlotte. To the easy critics who file her under his shadow, one question. Have you shaken off your own memories? She has not shaken off hers either. She has photographed, confronted them, which is a great deal harder, and the pictures survive the name that brought you to the door.
The gallery sits in a lane that stays quiet at any hour. Inside, a single rectangular room, kept dark, the prints lit one by one, so that walking through it becomes a walk through the house, through her eye. A text greets you first, signed in her hand. It sets out how she went in, and since it opens the show, it sets out how you go in too. She is in the house, she is alone, nobody is around, she takes her time. She unpacks her lenses, her tripod, her Hasselblad, and writes that she looks like a burglar. Sometimes by day, sometimes at night. She chooses without touching, without moving anything. She only looks, and she steals.
Some twenty prints hang in the room, square, black and white, and almost none of them show a face. A heap of white leather shoes fills one frame, laces slack, the uppers creased into the exact posture of feet that are no longer inside them. They are Repetto Zizis, the soft goatskin richelieu designed in the seventies for the dancer Zizi Jeanmaire and adopted by Gainsbourg until the model became known by his own name. He wore them without socks. Photographed in a heap, out of their myth, they are simply worn shoes, and wear is the closest photography comes to a pulse.
On another wall, a packet of Gitanes rests with a lighter on dark lacquer, doubled by its own reflection, the room behind it dissolving into soft coins of light. The cigarette was his signature and his undoing, and here it waits on the surface as though he had stepped out for a minute. Both pictures work the same way. She photographs the two objects the public already associates with him, and gives them back as things rather than as icons, close, unarranged, exactly where she found them.
Then there is the staircase, cut on the diagonal, the treads catching the only light in the frame while everything around them falls into black. It is the most abstract picture in the show and the one that says the most about the method. She builds absence out of what a house does when nobody is walking through it.
All of it was photographed on a deadline. Serge Gainsbourg died in the house in 1991. It stayed shut for more than thirty years, its facade thickening with graffiti, until it opened as Maison Gainsbourg in September 2023, preserved exactly as it stood on the day he died. Charlotte Gainsbourg owns it and kept it that way. She went in with her camera in the months before the doors opened. She got there before the visitors.
“5 Bis” was made with the House of Saint Laurent, under Anthony Vaccarello, and with Maja Hoffmann, and curated by Matthieu Humery. It travels to the Saint Laurent Rive Droite boutique on the rue Saint-Honoré from 24 September, and the catalogue published by the House carries her handwritten memories of the place. None of that patronage crowds the pictures, which are small, dark and unbranded.
