Bruno Bébert

Photographer

Alongside his artistic work, Bruno Bébert is a press photographer. He has taken up the family torch. In the Bébert family, from grandfather onwards, we are "image hunters" from father to son. As a correspondent for press agencies on the Côte d'Azur, he quickly made a name for himself. He has worked for Sipa Press, the Associated Press and now, for over 10 years, with the Bestimage agency. He has produced numerous reports and covers for French and foreign magazines such as Time, Paris-Match, Bunte, the Daily Mirror, Oggi and Hola...

At the first stage of the wave, there is the reportage. The one that gave life to the original photograph, la Vague, on which the spectator's gaze has the leisure to anchor itself in each jolt of foam, as it would linger over the slightest brushstroke on the canvas of a painting. Emerging from a burst of photography - a small miracle that only the photographic eye can recognise - Bruno Bébert's Wave provided the impetus for a series of other "Thousand-stroke Waves".

It's always facing the sea, framed by a pergola on the Prom, that the photographer from Nice captures the indomitable - frozen in its fury for the time of a print. Witness to climate degradation, at the heart of the planet's current ecological challenges, la Vague actually soothes more than it worries. And it is in the repetition of the photographer's gesture, in the reproduction of a shooting device, in the heart of the Baie des Anges environment so familiar to his gaze, in the expectation of a new phenomenon, that the story of a work of patience is written, where the subject imposes its inconstancy on the artist. In deciding to return to the woman who is never the same, nor quite another, Bruno Bébert confronts the impossible: to meet again.

In stark contrast to the flood of images that often overwhelm our contemporaries, la Vague and its nine sisters deliver a singular poetics of contemplation, like a delightful corpus of photographic haikus.

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