The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Sara A. Tremblay, Silvia Gérome
[December 20, 2023] By Louis Perreault. Books are finishing points. As a form, they seem to say, here is what has been achieved, all paths lead here, and all equivocations end here. Yet, how long they will last – their life expectancy – is impossible to predict…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Louis Perreault
[December 13, 2023] By Louis Perreault. “Nína, who was leaving the local grocery store at that moment, experienced the sound of the landslide as ‘visceral,’ like a primal moan emanating from the earth.” It was late December 2020 and raining prodigiously in Seyðisfjörður, a small port town perched near the lip of a fjord in eastern Iceland…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault
[December 13, 2023] By Louis Perreault. In 2019, the American artist and author Jenny Odell published the delectable book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Beyond its intriguing title, this dense essay deals with sociology, art, and ecology and contains fantastic opportunities to consider new ways of conceiving the world in which we live…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Ewa Monika Zebrowski
[December 5, 2023] By Louis Perreault. We can almost hear the murmur of the countryside filtering in through half-open windows. We imagine this soundtrack crescendoing by a few decibels within these walls, a gentle reverberation mixed with the sound of Alessandro Twombly’s footsteps as he guides the artist Ewa Monika Zebrowski through the house of his late father, the celebrated painter, sculptor, and photographer Cy Twombly…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Hors d’état, Peter Dubinski
[December 5, 2023] By Louis Perreault The history of the photobook has been built around the figures of the artist and the publisher, both essential to the medium. Such individuals sparkle with creativity, influence their peers, and make a river of critics’ ink flow. Artists, of course, are fundamental to photobooks. They provide them with […]
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Kate Hutchinson
[November 29, 2023] By Louis Perreault. Interior, day: an apartment with wide mouldings and timeworn hardwood floors. On the table in the dining room, diffuse light falls on all sorts of objects. A plant sits beside a child’s toy, a large vase filled with water, a bouquet of flowers, and an antique clock…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Hua Jin
[November 29, 2023] By Louis Perreault. The cover of Hua Jin’s book Dundee immediately reveals the ambiguity of what is contained within. A simple made-up definition of the title word, printed in white on the cream-coloured cloth, hints at the poetry infusing the book’s pages: “A place that could be in Scotland or here or elsewhere. The image that we make of where we come from and where we end up.”…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Bertrand Carrière
[November 9, 2023] By Louis Perreault. Photographers extract from reality fragments of space-time that they see as meaningful. From these shots are then decanted the images with the greatest potential for building a series or sequence. Thus, photographers follow a principle of subtraction: from a larger grouping they patiently distill the essence of the artwork to come. As they conduct this pruning process, their artistic sensibilities are activated, their vision is clarified, their language is defined…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Cristian Ordóñez
[June 22, 2023] By Louis Perreault. Frequency opens, paradoxically, on an image of a closed door, blocked with weathered plywood and fixed in an indefinable temporality. As it does in the photographs that will follow, the diffuse light drops a blanket of silence, pausing the tenacious urban soundtrack…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Moe Suzuki
[August 30, 2022] By Louis Perreault. Opening the hard cover of Sokohi, which slides easily on the metal-ring binding, we discover the tight reframing of an archival photograph showing a boy’s eye.
The Photobook
Authors: Jérôme Delgado, Louis Perreault, Michel Hardy-Vallée, Zoë Tousignant
[August 27, 2022] Round table discussion presented by Ciel Variable at the 2022 Papier Art Fair. The discussion was held in French.
Ciel variable 120 - FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION | Book Reviews
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Matt Johnston
[Summer 2022] By Louis Perreault Photobooks & A critical companion to the contemporary medium Onomatopee, Eindhoven, Pays-Bas, 2021, 210 p. [Excerpt] Much has been written about the effervescence of the photobook as a medium since the early 2000s. The importance of books that retrace the history of the medium – celebrating the genre’s classics and […]
Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Book Reviews
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Gregory Halpern
May 18, 2022 [originally published in CV105 in Winter 2017] — In the photography world, the book continues to play an essential role of dissemination. Yet, beyond simply being a tool for promotion of a photographer’s work, the book is seen by many as a creative space on its own…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Kikuji Kawada
[April 21, 2022] By Louis Perreault. Kikuji Kawada began to work on Chizu in 1958, when he went to Hiroshima for the magazine Shūkan Shinshō to photograph Ken Domon, who had just published a book titled after the ill-fated city…
Ciel variable 119 - AGAINST NATURE | Portfolios
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Thomas Kneubühler
[Winter 2022] By Louis Perreault [Excerpt] In the first photograph in Alpine Signals, the immaculate white of a horse’s mane offers a reminder of the clouds that overhang the distant mountains. The blue sky spreads above the shrubs positioned in the centre of the composition, which pick up the colour of the verdant nature in […]
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Betty Bogaert
[December 16, 2021] By Louis Perreault. Over the Vercors massif and the Haute-Maurienne valley roll heavy clouds, saturated with what may be tomorrow’s weather. Night falls slowly. In a hut overlooking a grassy expanse, tea leaves are dropped into boiling water, and the creaking of old…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Josée Pedneault
[December 16, 2021] By Louis Perreault. Scientific accounts explaining the origin of the universe have always been confronted with beliefs arising from the times within which they were pronounced. Although the great laws of physics have probably elucidated the mystery of the creation of…
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Guillaume Tomasi
[December 15, 2021] By Louis Perreault. Certain events transform our lives, leaving indelible marks of their passage. The usual and the common are no longer what they used to be, and the people around us are suddenly thrown into a new light…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Sarah Boutin
[December 9, 2021] By Louis Perreault. Artist Sarah Boutin’s Prendre fin1 isn’t, properly speaking, a photobook; it’s more like a creative journal or an artist book…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Louis Perreault
[December 7, 2021] By Louis Perreault. “Human experience is a memory instantly archived and digitized.”1 This statement sets the table for an adventure in the world of artist Antoine Giroux. At first, we resist the statement…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Hubert Gaudreau
[November 30, 2021] By Louis Perreault. Two golden circles overlap, like a Venn diagram, on the front of Hubert Gaudreau’s softcover book Les autres imaginaires1. The theory of groups that Gaudreau proposes is indeed composed of interconnected elements. That is, as long as we are ready to enter these…
Authors: Louis Perreault
[November 30, 2021] By Louis Perreault. In Mosquitia, a coastal region in northeast Honduras, the “woman of the waters,” better known locally as liwa mairin, reigns. The daring men who dive into the depths of the Caribbean Sea to catch sea cucumbers and other fine edibles too often pay the price of her curse…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Simon Émond
[November 23, 2021] By Louis Perreault. On the cover of Rebâtir le ciel, the terms associated with different gender identities are intermingled with those of astronomy. Androgyny, near-Earth object, gender dysphoria, black galaxy, lesbophobia, telluric planet, biological sex, and other radio-astronomical bodies form a sort of long poem…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Jessica Auer
[November 23, 2021] By Louis Perreault. In Jessica Auer’s most recent film, Shore Power, one scene could act as prelude for Looking North. We see a large window, opening out to a calm body of water. After a moment, on the right, a huge ferry appears and then crosses the image very slowly…
The Photobook
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Anne-Marie Proulx
[November 23, 2021] By Louis Perreault. Stretching out on the black asphalt are rays of hard light that have pierced through the foliage of a white ash tree. Farther on, cobblestones, aged by several hundred years of foot, car, and horse traffic, suggest an old American city, which is not named…
Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Book Reviews
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Ron Jude
[Summer 2021] 12 Hz Ron Jude Londres, Mack Books, 2020, 128 p. Par Louis Perreault [Excerpt] Even before we open its cover, 12 Hz seems to vibrate on the table. As we plunge into the ice, rock, and powerful sea currents that mark out the pages of this book by American photographer Ron Jude, we […]
Ciel variable 110 - MIGRATION | Book Reviews
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Kristine Potter
[Fall 2018] This article was originally published only in French. You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Essays
Authors: Louis Perreault
July 31, 2017 [originally published in CV109 in Spring 2018] — First, there was a fox. A few strollers noticed him, but he evaded a closer look by disappearing into the weeds of a post-industrial lot in Montreal East. I quickly took a liking to the animal and made him a sort of personal totem…
Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Book Reviews
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Mathieu Asselin
August 17, 2021 [originally published in French only in CV109 in Summer 2018] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Book Reviews
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Vincent Delbrouck
April 6, 2021 [originally published in French only in CV108 in Winter 2018] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 107 - RUINS | Book Reviews
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: Masahisa Fukase
September 29, 2020 [originally published in French only in CV107 in Fall 2017] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.
Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Book Reviews
Authors: Louis Perreault
May 21, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.