Sandrine Elberg. Constellations, Paris, Éditions Lord Byron, 2025
First edition
Edition of 320 copies
Hardcover, 23 x 27.5 cm, 240 pages
Bilingual edition: French, English
Translation by John Barrett
ISBN: 978-2-488446-01-3
The book Sandrine Elberg. Constellations traces the artist’s creative journey over the past fifteen years and includes a critical essay by art historian Michel Poivert.
“Does the most contemporary photography reconnect with the tradition of the ‘scientific marvelous’ born with the literature of Jules Verne? Is this an opportunity to move beyond the very limits of the photographic medium by experimenting with all the dimensions of the image? For nearly a decade, Sandrine Elberg’s universe has offered a double exploration: that of photography and that of representations of the cosmos. From the infinitely large to the infinitely small, photographic experimentation has been—and remains—the means of renewing our imagination of nature. How? By disarming the gaze, by representing the macro and the micro through the materiality of photography, produced on all types of supports, by ‘de-anthropizing’ the gaze—that is, by showing what we ourselves cannot see. Responding in her own way to the crisis of sensibility, Sandrine Elberg goes beyond photography as a mere image in order to more fully engage the imagination.” (Excerpt from the text by Michel Poivert)
Sandrine Elberg lives and works in Paris. She studied film, audiovisual media, and visual arts, earned an MFA in Digital Media Art at the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design in Vancouver, and then completed a post-graduate year at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she graduated with a DNSAP in 2003. Sandrine Elberg has participated in more than one hundred events related to photography and contemporary art within prestigious institutions: Institut Français du Japon, Musée Vernon, the BnF Collection at the Grand Palais, CPG Centre de la Photographie in Geneva, Tri Postal in Lille, LAAC in Dunkirk… At the invitation of the first Paris Expérience Photo festival, supported by the RATP, her large-format prints covered the walls of Paris metro stations. The artist is also a winner and finalist of several major photographic awards: Prix SwissLife à 4 mains, Prix Dahinden, Villa Kujoyama/Institut Français au Japon, Prix Photographie et Sciences supported by the 1+2/CNRS residency, Talents contemporains Fondation François Schneider, Prix HSBC, Fondation Les Treilles, Prix Scam Roger Pic, Prix Arte actions culturelles and Prix Réponses Photo at the Les Boutographies festival, Prix Canon, Prix Fnac, and Nikon.
Michel Poivert, born in September 1965, is a French historian of photography and exhibition curator. He served as president of the Société française de photographie for fifteen years. In 2018, he founded the Collège international de photographie. A former student of the École du Louvre, Michel Poivert defended a doctoral dissertation in art history in 1992 at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, under the supervision of José Vovelle, focusing on Pictorialism in France, followed in 2002 by a habilitation thesis analyzing the relationship between photography and the avant-gardes throughout the twentieth century. Since 2006, he has been a professor at the same university. From 2009 to 2012, he served as director of the École d’Histoire de l’art et d’archéologie at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He was also director of the Doctoral School of Art History at the same university from 2013 to 2018. From 2010 to 2019, he was co-director of the research master’s program in the History of Photography at the École du Louvre in Paris. He has been a member of the editorial boards of La Revue de l’art and Études photographiques. Among the reference publications of which he is the author are La Photographie pictorialiste en France (coll. “Le siècle d’or de la photographie”, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale-Hoëbeke, 1992), La photographie contemporaine (coll. “contemporain”, Paris, Flammarion, 2002), L’Art de la photographie des origines à nos jours, (ed.) with André Gunthert et al. (Paris, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2007), and Les Peintres photographes (Paris, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2017).
