Lettres à un médecin

Stanislas Amand

Category:
  • Photographs: Stanislas Amand
  • Texts by:
    Stanislas Amand
    Nicolas Féodoroff
    Anne Klein
    Yvon Lemay
    Thomas Micoulet
    Anne-Laure Oberson
  • 208 pages
  • Size: 15 x 24 cm
  • Softcover
  • ISBN: 979-10-92265-06-4
  • €25

From Stanislas Amand, we already know his Lettres à une galeriste, a correspondence with a fictional character sharing observations and reflections on the world around us.
Here is Lettres à un médecin a change of contact, certainly. But the method remains the same. Indeed, medicine, hospital, and some of its tools such as photography are all passed to the scrutiny filter of Stanislas Amand. Here, he gives us a sort of personal atlas consisting of an image corpus initially defined, that the institution has produced: its technical photographs, conference proceedings, daily life of the staff of the hospital. Describing, remembering, showing, are the main functions of the selected photographs. Redistributed the way they are by Stanislas Amand, the categories flicker.

In Lettres à un médecin the gaze of Stanislas Amand plays a key role as he goes through the archives he gathered, which, once mixed with images he produced, act like icons of the history of photography and painting. Crossing, confronting, associating one image with another, whether medical records or collections of objects, Stanisls Amand brings our attention to productions filling most often a practical aim: photographs of various diseases, care accessories… The aesthetic value of images and objects is thus revealed; a move that is fully claimed by Stanislas Amand and which takes its roots in a dialectical articulation between the document and the aesthetic object, a movement going back and forth with a long and rich history since the invention of photography, a movement that helps us to build our own look toward the pictures.

With Stanislas Amand, the document tends to become a kind of monument showing a secret history of forms, which acts as a kind of developer.

With his choice of images, Stanislas Amand searches in our fascination for what makes an image overflow itself, touching us in our intimacy, beyond its circumscribed roles but also going past the simple nostalgic feeling.

Stanislas Amand lives between Paris and Toulon. Trained in mathematics and former student of the National School of Photography in Arles, he was laureate of the Villa Medicis prize in 1997.
He is preparing a book on the relationship between aesthetics and urban policy. Lecturer at the Institute of Urbanism in Paris (University of Créteil), its activity naturally creates bridges between the too often compartmentalized logics of the art and the city life.