Anaïs Tondeur’s approach is rooted in ecological thought. She is engaged in an interdisciplinary practice through which she explores new ways of narrating the world, that can transform our ways of relating to other living beings and the earth’s great cycles.

Composing a kind of awareness lab, she develops her work through research and fiction, presented in the form of walks, installations, photography or procedures related to alchemy.

Many of her projects thus spring from encounters, sentient occurrences with an element, a territory or other ways of knowing and perceiving the world. She thus
enjoys doing research, which leads to a state of amplified openness and attentiveness. Whether tracking real phenomena or imagined elements and characters, these subjects become guides into worlds that would otherwise remain out of reach and out of sight.

Her research protocols lead her on expeditions across the Atlantic, on the border of tectonic plates, to the Chernobyl exclusion zone, under the surface of Paris,
in polluted urban soils or under the atmospheric flow of anthropic particles. But when she cannot access the territories of her investigations, she creates fictitious vehicles, which travel for her. She thus sent a dream into space on board the Osiris Rex, a NASA spaceship.

She graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2008 and the Royal College of Arts in 2010 in London, won the Art of Change 21 prize and received the Cyber Arts Ars Electronica honourable mention in 2019. She has presented and exhibited her work in international institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, la Gaîté Lurique, Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Frac Grand Large, the Serpentines Galleries (London), Bozar (Bruxelles,), the Biennale di Venezia, the Pavillon Français and the Nam June Paik Art Center (Seoul).

Her approach is thus inscribed in an interdisciplinary practice, collaborating with anthropologists and philosophers, geologists and mathematicians, bio-
geneticists and ecologists, oceanographers and astronomers through artist residencies or immersions in science labs.

Dmitry grew up north of Moscow, in an industrial village. At the age of 16, he wrote an article for a local journal about his friends who consumed heroin, thereby discovering a passion for journalism. He then studied philology but left university in his third year for a full-time journalism job. He worked for weekly Russian magazine Argumenty i Facty for four years.

He then left his hometown for a village close to Pskov, a small Russian town 12km away from Estonia, where he went on to work for eight years as an educator in an orphanage for handicapped children, which he narrated in his blog. In 2009, he launched a children’s village project.

In 2013, Dmitry open his Instagram account. It was unpretentious, yet it quickly rose to fame. Everything changed when he participated in the “Burn Diary” project, for which he photographed everyday life in the town of Pskov. It won him many prizes and photographic awards.

In 2015, Dmitry Markov received a scholarship from Getty Images and Instagram for his activity as a documentary photographer, which allowed him to continue documenting the system’s castaways.

In 2016, he was the first Russian photographer to participate in the Apple photography contest dedicated to iPhones. He was chosen by Apple for their Shot on iPhone advertising campaign. That same year, he won the Silver Camera grand prize and the philanthropic activist prize.

In his flow of daily photographs, Dmitry acts as a mirror, showing the harsh life of the Russian populations that he lives and works with, the people that pass beneath the radar. He draws up an unflattering yet realistic portrait of the inhabitants of the countries’ provinces.

He got into photography quite late, but this activity soon became a partner, a travelling companion, in all the “highs and lows” of his life.

Dmitry is a man who uses photography consciously: to bear witness, of course, but also for his own good, for he is honest enough to share his contradictions and weaknesses. His activism deeply permeates his work, some of his photos stage children and teenagers from orphanages in which he has volunteered.

He devours the world with his eyes, trying to find his place in it, and, thanks to the strength of his pictures, he manages to embark us on his story. He looks at his subjects in the same way he looks at himself, without condescension or moral judgement.

His practice consists in documenting scenes with his iPhone, then sharing them on his popular Instagram account where he describes his life as a man of his times. Dmitry Markov often captures intimate and light moments shared amongst

friends and strangers, emphasizing their humanity. Over time, he has created a multi-faceted self-portrait, searching for his own identity through the presence of others.

On 2nd February 2021, while he was protesting in front of the Moscow municipal courthouse where Russian activist Alexei Navalny was standing trial, Dmitry Markov was arrested by the police. While he was in custody, he took a picture which became viral when he posted it on his Instagram account which now has over 839 000 followers.

When Dmitry isn’t taking pictures, he volunteers as a social worker.

MAYCO NAING is a major figure in Asian photography. She was born in Burma in 1984
and now lives in France.

Mayco learnt photography when the universities were closed by the military, by getting a job in a photo studio for 3$ per month. She is now a famous photographer and teacher and has actively participated in all the Yangon Photo Festival sessions as an organiser.

She has received many prizes for her personal work and has exhibited abroad.

Marco Naing is an artist famous for her Identity of Fear portrait series, which captures the spirit of the Burmese generation born at the time of the 1988 revolution.

She got very little education, was taught conservative values, and turned of age under a repressive military regime. Using her newfound freedom of speech and wanting to share her experience, Mayco hopes to be able to train many citizen artists and photojournalists, especially in regions where ethnic minorities still face armed conflict.

For her, art is not merely a medium through which she questions the state of Burmese society, it is also a tool to change women’s place in society. During the 1st February 2021 coup, Mayco immediately took to the streets to capture the populations on the barricades. Mayco and her comrades were pursued by the military junta for having exercised their photojournalistic work. Many were arrested, others are on the run, and Mayco is hosted in an artist residency, far from her home and loved ones.

ISABELLE HA EAV is a French artist of Sino-Hispanic origin who lives in Marseille.

Isabelle Ha Eav trained as an engraver and then as a photographer, notably at the National School of Photography in Arles.

In her pictures, she explores the notions of presence and absence, impression, erasure and disappearance. She works with the history of photography, exploring the materiality of images. This translates into contemporary experiments, that interact with old techniques such as gum bichromate.

This technique, invented in the mid-19th century, combines the processes of photography and painting, using pigments, paintbrushes and brushes. The photograph is formed after the assembly of several layers of emulsion, allowing for a very peculiar density and depth in the resulting images.

Blending photographs, sculptures and experiments with the photographic medium, Isabelle Ha Eav’s work questions the body’s interactions with spaces, whether it be a living space, a transitional space, or a non-place. In a dialectic between the visible and the non-visible, the image interacts with its materiality through different experiences of the photographic medium.

Her work has recently been exhibited at the Yangon Photo Festival 2020, the Taïnan International Foto Festival 2019, and the Rencontres de la Jeune Photographie Internationale 2018. It has also been selected for the Human Photographic Prize 2020, the Voies Off Prize, the QPN Prize and the François Schneider Foundation’s Contemporary Talents Prize.

She then completed an artist residency at the Camille Claudel Museum.

PRINTEMPS BIRMAN (Burmese Spring) showcases 14 Burmese and Rohingya poets and 6 photographers,
all of whom have been exiled, imprisoned or assassinated by the military since the February 2021 coup. Their work is a testimony brimming with astonishment, anger and determination. Prefaced by novelist Wendy Law-Yone and edited by Mayco Naing and Isabelle Ha Eav, this book aims to give voice to the poets and photographers who are participating or have participated in the “Myanmar Spring” civil resistance movement, which was severely repressed by the ruling junta.

Printemps Birman was published in February 2022 by Marseille-based publisher Héliotropismes.

Gabrielle Duplantier studied fine arts and history of art in the university of Bordeaux.
Back then, photography, which she had practiced since a young age, was a mere pastime.

Once she got her diploma, she decided to become independent and settled in Paris, where she worked as a photographer’s assistant or as a set photographer.

On 2002 Gabrielle moved back to the Basque country. She was inspired by this beautiful and fascinating place and began a series of images where landscapes, people and animals were captured in impressionistic photographs.

Gabrielle Duplantier’s photographic world seems to be wilfully detached from historical or social reality. Thus, her topics are not really thematic; she is on a quest for beautiful images that exist for themselves, outside of any context.

Between “accidental” shots and dark room experiments, it took her time to develop her own photographic style, inspired by painters, an essentially feminine and intimate world which shows the magic of ordinary life, with a sombre use of black and white.

Parallel to her many collaborations with the press, publishers or musicians, Gabrielle Duplantier pursued her personal work on the female portrait, one of her favourite topics. Another source of inspiration is Portugal, her home country, which she visits on a regular basis.

Her work has often been exhibited and published in France and abroad. She published many books, such as Chapelles du Pays Basque and La mer console de toutes les laideurs with writer Marie Darrieussecq at Editions Cairn, Les enfants d’ici at Editions Lezards qui bougent, then in 2014 Volta (meaning “return” in Portuguese) followed by Terres Basses in 2019, both at Editions Lamaindonne.

In 2012, Gabrielle Duplantier appeared in MONO, published by Gomma books, a monograph of the best present-day black and white photographers, along with artists such as Michael Ackerman, Trent Parke, Anders Petersen, and Roger Ballen.

She also collaborated with the Temps Zéro collective, a collective artistic project which married sound to photographic or video images.

Gabrielle Duplantier is currently represented by Galerie 127.

In 1984, he entered the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, with the aim of becoming a press illustrator. However, the following year, a trip to Borneo, during which he lived with the Palawan people, the last jungle nomads, radically changed the course of his life.

The sedentary artist became a nomadic observer, and photography became his means of expression. While still a student at the Arts Décoratifs in Paris, he repeatedly made long trips to the Philippines jungle with the Palawan people. He spent a total of over four years living with them.

A first part of his work on the Palawan people was presented at the photo festival Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles in 1988.

Pierre de Vallombreuse was secretary general of the Association Anthropologie et Photographie (Paris VII university), created by Edgar Morin, Emmanuel Garrigues, and Jean Malaurie. He published over a dozen books and exhibited his work in festivals, museums and galleries.

He regularly collaborates with important international magazines such as Newsweek, El Mundo, El País, La Stampa, Le Monde, GEO, Photo Answers, Figaro Magazine, L’Oeil de la Photographie and Camera International.

Since 1986, Pierre has relentlessly testified to the lives of indigenous peoples around the world. These indigenous peoples bear witness to the diversity of responses to living conditions imposed by nature and history.

Pierre de Vallombreuse unveils the complex reality of the way of life of these weakened peoples whose heritage is essential for us. He fights for their respect and their fair representation.

His work is like a wake-up call. It is structured around vast projects that are carried out over many years: Peuples, Hommes racines, Souverains, Badjao – une disparition silencieuse, La Vallée, W. Project USA. Their aim is to alert the public about the fate of these populations, for far from the primitive, exotic and archaic reality conveyed about them, the reality that he shows us through photography is quite different: it’s a fight for their survival.

These populations are indeed way too often the primary victims of genocides, war, racist ideologies, economic predation, food shortages and environmental disasters.
These are crucial issues which, rather than being limited to these faraway territories, pertain to our humanity.

Over 30 years, Pierre de Vallombreuse has constituted a unique photographic collection of 130 000 photographs of 43 indigenous groups the world over, which honours cultural diversity and reveals these peoples’ realities.