Sophie Ristelhueber – Portfolio

Sophie Ristelhueber – Portfolio |

PORTFOLIO ! Portfolio

Lives and works in Paris

Sophie Ristelhueber



BIOGRAPHY ! Born in 1949 (FR)

Sophie Ristelhueber has continued a re!ection on territory and its history for about thirty years, through a unique approach to the ruins and traces le" by mankind in those places devastated by war or by natural and cultural upheaval. Far from the classical photo story, she strives to imple-ment the bare act and the stamp of history on both the body and on the landscape, by rendering visible wounds and scars, veritable memories of the “acts” of history.

If she essentially turns to photography in her work, Sophie Ristelhueber utilizes her shooting to create full plastic works, playing with the material and the format of the image, its status, its framework and its display.

Severals monographic shows were dedicated to her work at MDD, Museum Dhondt-Dhae-nens (Gent, 2010), Galeries Nationales du Jeu de Paume (Paris, 2009), Fondation La Maison Rouge (Paris, 2007), MAMCO/Cabinet de Estampes (Genève, 2005), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, 2001), Hotel des arts de Toulon (2000), Musée Zadkine (Paris, 2002), #e Imperial War Museum (London, 1993), Centraal Museum (Utrech, 1994), Le Magasin (Grenoble, 1992), Le Consortium (Dijon, 1995), #e Power Plant ( Toronto, 1999), Viriginia Beach Center for the Arts (1998) ...

Her works has been exhibited in international institutions among which MoMA (New York, US), PS1 New York (USA), Tate Modern (London, GB), Guggenheim Museum (USA), MART Rove-reto (IT), Cooper Union (USA), Mukha Antwerp (BE), Sculpturemuseum (DE), Venice Biennial (IT), International Center of Photography (USA), Fotomuseum Winterthur (CH), North Caroli-na Museum of Art (USA), ZKM (DE), Camden art Center (UK), Houston Center for Photography (USA), Cleveland Museum of Arts (USA), biennials of Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, Liverpool, Trien-nial of Etchigo-Tsumari and in France at Centre Pompidou/ Musée National d’Art Moderne, Mu-sée du Louvre, Louvre-Lens, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Musée Zadkine, Musée Rodin ...

Sophie Ristelhueber



PERES ! 2014

!is "lm entitled Pères (Fathers) that Sophie Ristelhueber made at the invitation of «Ligne de Front» (Front Line) as part of the commemoration of the First World War centenary, of which one of the other high points is the exhibition «Les désastres de la guerre. 1800-2014» A#er its preview at the gallery, Pères (Fathers) will then be screened from June 14 to September 28 in Vermelles, in the framework of a histo-rical and artistic itinerary around ten towns of the Artois province that bears the marks of the 1914-1918 front line.

It is in her family home in Vulaines, next to Fontainebleau, that she found the matter of her "lm. !e artist once again took high angle shots, this time not leaning onto the stretches of the Kuwait desert (Fait, 1992), onto the aisles of the Luxembourg Gardens (Le Luxembourg, 2002) or on the paths of the Vercors (Le Chardon, 2007), but on the worn out $oors and the threadbare carpets of her childhood home, tram-pled upon by several generations, and particularly by a great-uncle, called up in 1914 and who died in the battle"eld in 1916 at the age of 22. It is when reading the letters of her «young» forefather, evoking this house while he was on the front lines, that Ristelhueber decided to work there, far from any theater of war, and yet bearing deep and implicit marks caused by the disappearance of those gone to "ght.

!e "lm is carried by the famous Lied Der Elkönig (1813) that Schubert composed at the age of 16 for a poem by Goethe. In it, the German poet describes the frantic race through a forest, on horseback, of a father and his young son, whom he fails to protect from death, ignoring his anxieties and his pleas.

Exhibition view of "Pères" at the Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris, 2014


PORTFOLIO | Portfolio

Pères, 2014Color HD video,13’



Pères, 2014Color HD video,13’



UNTITLED | 2011

!e series « Untitled » (2011) directed in the underground of the Latone ornamental pool in Versailles, exhumes in broad daylight the pipe works network which supplies the palace’s waterworks. It is a strange descent in the womb of an architectural beast. And one can guess that the proud order at the surface has been for centuries depending on the cleverly hidden chaos of the lead pipe network.

With these new images, Sophie Ristelhueber investigates another ground, she opens another front, that which lies under our feet. We enter an unsuspected territory, similar to a body. !e shades are grey, ochre, muddy. We can follow the outlines as in a functional exploration. We are in real life, in complete #ction. !e ambivalence of the subject is striking, as is the artist's vocabulary concerning tracks, scars or borders. !ey record time and life erosion. Everything intertwines in the approach of our bodies towards these images, and in the inner sight it arouses.

Untitled 1, 2011Color photograph, pigment print on paper laminated on aluminium, framed100 x 150 cmEdition of 3 + 2 AP









Sophie Ristelhueber, Eleven Blowups, 2006Artist book made of 28 pages including 11 images.Bookstorming Edition, Paris25 x 31,83 cmSold out print.

Distancing herself more than ever from the idea of documenting or recording reality through photo-graphy, the eleven images from Eleven blowups consist of works in themselves. Particularly marked by the attack that cost the life of Ra!c Hariri in 2005, creating a gigantic crater in the street of Beirut, So-phie Ristelhueber viewed three years in the audiovisual archives at Reuters in order to study thousands of images of attacks and bombardments, peering into the craters that thereby resulted, concentrating on their topography while attempting to abstract herself from the human dramas that were linked to them. It’s from a synthesis of these visions that she composed, thanks to computer so"ware, using indistinctly some fragments from her own images taken during twenty years from Asia Minor to the Middle East, and that she realized by digital collage to depict thus a picture, a composite uni-versal landscape.

#e eleven photographs from Eleven Blowups were exhibited the !rst time at the Rencontres photo-graphiques d’Arles in 2006, then at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in 2009. #ese works gave rise to some silver prints in color (edition of 3) and as well to some serigraphs on glass (120 x 146 cm, edition of 3).



Eleven Blowups #1, 2006Colour silver print mounted on aluminium and framed, 110 x 133 cm each Edition of 3









WB ! 2005

A stone war. Not the « War of the Stones » but a war between stones. Sophie Ristelhueber's eye reveals to the Palestinian ground traveller what he feels without always !nding the words to express it. As if the picture showed the essence, the hidden stake of the confrontation between two connections to nature, two ways of being in a same place: the so"ness of the simple, patient, and so loving landscape moulded by the occupied, violence of the landscape produced by the occupants.

Starting from a simple observation – did Sophie Ristelhueber know the expression « road blockers » to refer to highwaymen? –, the photographer («Doubtless, as an artist, I am at war, too», she writes) has undertaken to relate the occupation focusing on the so many broken o#, battered and banned roads and paths, not by the so sadly well known « check points » but by the stones themselves.

Sophie Ristelhueber, WB, 200610,7 x 17 cmArtist book made of 112 pages including 54 colour photographs$ames & Hudson, London and Paris



WB #01, 2005Colour photograph, silver print mounted on aluminium120 x 150 cm eachEdition of 3 + 1 AP












Dead Set signi#es ‘#rmly decided or determined’. For Sophie Ristelhueber this means: ‘It’s absolutely what I see!’ When she travels and operates as an artist, she immediately sees what she has to show, at the #rst level, without lengthy hesitation, reframing or reworking her subject - and in the same movement, which comes from her careful reconnaissance, she suggests a second level. In the ‘dead set’ of works we are confronted with aridity of the landscape, the barred horizon, things disarticulated and death. In other words Sophie Ristelhueber marks life as stopped, as unful#lled …

Dead Set displays the skeletons of buildings and ruins clear of any machines or objects that could suggest that the work is still un#nished. Contemporary worksites engulfed by silence join the colonnade of anti-quity: ‘I photograph real things that are already no longer’.

Rainer Michael Mason, 2001

DEAD SET | 2001

Dead Set, 2001Pigment print mounted on aluminium90 x 135cmEdition of 3



Dead Set, 2001Pigment print mounted on aluminium90 x 135 cmEdition of 3



Dead Set, 2001Pigment print mounted on aluminium90 x 135 cmEdition of 3



“How to render homage while making a work? How to create, approach the acts of society, hold back the anger that is in me, without falling into activism?” Sophie Ristelhueber asked herself. Upon her return from a trip in Yugoslavia in July, 1991, while the con$ict between Serbs and Croats was just beginning. With drawings to support her, she projected carrying out a series of photographs of scars, traced upon the bodies following some surgical procedures. !e photographs were taken not in Sarajevo but, quietly, in a Paris hospital. “!e link with Yugoslavia will be clear”... Arises from this project fourteen black and white silver prints, from which Sophie Ristelhueber then made single prints, enlarging them to the dimensions of an art work of large format. Out of the fourteen distinct photographs that made up the series Every One, only seven were printed in 1994.

Unique editions, the majority of these works are to be found today in public and private collections (Museum of Fine Arts in Boston ; Victoria and Albert Museum London, Musée National d’Art Moderne - Centre Pompidou in Paris). Every One #3 was exhibited in several exhibitions among which the most recent at the Musée Rodin in Paris, confronting this image with sutured plaster casts by Auguste Rodin.

EVERY ONE | 1994

Every One, 1994Artist book14 x 9cm, 64 pagesOut of print



Every One #5, 1994Black and white photograph, silver print laminated on wood #ber plaque180 x 270 cmUniquePrivate Collection



Every One #3, 1994Black and white photograph, silver print laminated on wood #ber plaque270 x 180 cmUniqueCollection of the artist



Every One #14, 1994Black and white photograph, silver print laminated on wood #ber plaque270 x 180 cmUniqueVictoria & Albert Museum's Collection, London



FAIT | 1992

Fait originated with a photograph published in the February 25, 1991 edition of Time magazine: a monochrome aerial view of the Kuwaiti desert. “I had been obsessed with the idea of this desert that was no longer one”, explained Sophie Ristelhueber who had arrived in Kuwait in October 1991, seven months a%er the end of the war. She succeeded in negotiating in conditions just as precarious as random to $y over the desert in an airplane or helicopter during four weeks, shooting the almost abstract traces of the con$ict drawn on the surface of a desert that she was also going to survey on foot with her camera. !e 71 photographs of the series Fait gave rise to large format prints #tted exactly à $eur de champ in a waxed wooden frame by the artist, hoisting these images to the status of veritable icons. !ey were published in a work designed by the artist, that hence is out of print, having become a cult object.

!e Fait series has been exhibited in numerous institutions, among which Museum of Modern Art de New-York, Imperial War Museum in London, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Albright-Know Art Gallery in Bu&alo (US), Power Plant in Toronto, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, etc. Each photograph of the series was limited to three copies. !e National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, acquired in 2013 the complete series of seventy-one photographs numbered 3/3.

In addition to numerous private collections, some individual image from Faits appear in international public collections, including Albright-Knox NY, Etats-Unis; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; MNAM - Centre Pompidou, Paris; Frac Basse Normandie; Frac Bretagne ; Frac PACA ; Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait, 199210,7 x 17 cmArtist book!ames and Hudson, London and Paris



Fait #28, 1992Colour or black and white photograph, silver print with golden polished frame100 x 126 x 5 cmEdition of 3 (no artist proof)












MEMOIRES DU LOT ! 1990

With Mémoires du Lot (Memories of the Lot), produced in 1990 in response to a commission by the regional authorities who were impressed by the artist’s earlier work for the Datar, Sophie Ristelhueber became openly involved in !ction, with a series of four photographs forming a quasi allegorical represen-tation of life. "e major themes depicted by this piece –humankind, the animal kingdom, landscape and territory– are the outcome of an intellectual constructs made in the studio, but they exist also as photo-graphic “truths”. In this way, Sophie Ristelhueber used photographs taken in the Negev desert, in the Jar-din des Plantes in Paris, and in her own home with a friend. "e extract she chose for the deliberately tiny book that she subsequently made is taken from the Prologue of the Book of Ecclesiastes, which relates all individual events to the general #ux of things and refers the iconographic work to its twofold truth.

Mémoires du Lot, which is the most accomplished example of Sophie Ristelhueber’s !ne semantic weave, is also the work whose conception is the most literally separable from its execution. "e so called !eld photographs were in fact taken or chosen in the artist’s studio.

Ann Hindry, 1998

Artist BookMémoires du Lot II, 199011,3 x 8,5 cm, 24 pages350 numbered copies



Mémoires du Lot II, 1990Black and white photography159 x 126 cmEdition of 3



A!er having participated in the famous photographic mission of the DATAR in 1984/1987, Sophie Ristelhueber was in vited in 1989 within the context of a twinning between French and Soviet cities. It was proposed that she photograph Armenia that had just been rocked by a major earthquake. Once again Sophie Ristelhueber presented photographs in color this time of a modern but nevertheless timeless architecture in ruins. “"ere, within the circle of the earthquake, among the cities of Kirovakan, Spitak and Leninakan, I wanted to show that landscape of desolation in color, but with attenuated almost monochromatic colors, with the perspective of those buildings that collapsed from the inside”.

"is series of #ve color photographs has only been exhibited once in 1991 within the framework of an exhibition organized by the Bourse du Commerce in Paris.

Arménie, 1989Silver color print50 x 60 cmEdition of 3

ARMÉNIE ! 1989









In Vulaines of 1989, the !ction is rendered more complex by an obvious autobiographical ingredient. (It would doubtless be more apt to reverse the proposal and say that the autobiographical dimension called for !ction...). "ese are very large format diptychs for an intimate subject. On the le#, there is a very narrow black-and-white photo that depicts people, mainly children, in a blurred rendition like old family albums, and on the right we have the plan of an interior in colour and in very large format."e whole is akin to an installation, such is the importance that the artist attaches to the framing –frames that are at once exquisite and antiquated and “bourgeois”, covered with Cordoba paper for the colour photographs and Chinese paper for the black-and-white photographs. Equally important is and the positioning of the works, at $oor level, in such a way that they submerge the onlooker the way objects belonging to the grown-up world submerge children. "is, incidentally, is the subject of the “interiors” part of the diptych: the ambivalence of given things. Here, the objects are photographed through the eye of a child, that is, both disproportioned and mysterious: a counterpane is just as much as a landscape, a strip of wallpaper turns into a map. "e emotional factor of the “secret” (Vulaines is the name of the village where the family home stands) called for taking a long step back. "is was achieved by the writing. "e 1989 photographs, along with a dozen photographs.

"is was achieved by the writing. "e 1989 photographs, along with a dozen photographs taken in1995, were brought together in a book titled Les Barricades mystérieuses ("e Mysterious Barricades), which the artist introduces with an excerpt from Lawrence Sterne’s masterpiece novel,Tristram Shandy. "is is a work that is little known in France, but it is one of the great classics of English literature, which even gave rise to a very fashionable-eighteen-century expression, “Shandyism”, describing a distressed re$ection about solitude, and the impossibility of speaking about oneself.

Ann Hindry, Hazan, Paris, 1998

VULAINES ! 1989



Vulaines I, 1989Silver color print, laminated on aluminium, with wallpaper covered frameDiptych 167,5 x 208 cm et 167,5 x 208 cmUnique, Collection of the artist



Vulaines V, 1989Silver color print, laminated on aluminium, with wallpaper covered frameDiptych 232 x 185 and 232 x 64 cmUnique, Collection of the artist



Vulaines VII, 1989Silver color print, laminated on aluminium, with wallpaper covered frameDiptych 232 x 185 and 232 x 64 cmUnique, Collection of the artist



BEYROUTH | 1984

Beyrouth, photographies, 1984 Silver black and white print50 x 60 cm

!is series of 31 black and white photographs was the founding factor for Sophie Ristelhueber’s work. During full civil war, the artist le% for Beirut in 1982 with the idea of making a work based on the modern city in ruins. If she utilized the means and took risks, Sophie Ristelhueber found herself at that time to be the exact opposite of the journalistic logic of photojournalism. It was a matter of photographing rather than documenting. Sophie Ristelhueber photographed contemporary ruins with no human presence, voluntarily avoiding any romanticism. !is work was based on the terrain of history, and not that of cur-rent events which in turn put into perspective the ruins of modernity and those of Antiquity.

Sophie Ristelhueber issued these 31 photographs in an artist’s book published by Hazan in 1984, for which she chose as an introduction a text by Lucretia on earthquakes. Conserved within the collections of the Cabinet des Estampes de Genève and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, this series resulted in individual prints made in the 1980s and limited to 5 copies.







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Sophie Ristelhueber – Portfolio