Anne-Marie Filaire is interested in the question of private spaces in different contexts, from her native Auvergne to the powder kegs of the Middle East – Egypt, Palestine or the United Arab Emirates – from South-east Asia, East Africa and Europe. In an approach both rigorous and poetic that has lasted for more than twenty-five years, she has photographed cities affected by war, disputed frontiers. The individuals’ strategies for existence, often hardly visible are what she wants to show. “In my photography, the landscape is not a continuum but an accumulation. An accumulation of time, of moments.”
In her own texts, Anne-Marie Filaire describes in a rather matter-of-fact way her stays in Israel and Palestine between 1999 and 2007 as well as her trip in 2006 to the suburbs of Beirut and south Lebanon. Under the title A Day without Pictures, in Sana’a (Yemen) on 20th July 2005, she gives us her impressions of the country and the city, information about her trips to Vietnam, but above all, elements of her personal life and her feelings. In her text, Géraldine Bloch writes, “The documentary and memory work that she has produced specifically about the Arab world today constitutes a precious collection, a scholarly and sensitive cartography of the last fifteen years”.
“But Anne-Marie Filaire’s work moves outside this area of attention and its epic possibility (that of photojournalism and reporting) to encounter that time and history where the historic meaning, instead of being in the event’s visible radiance, functions rather like a deposit, a sedimentation,” explained the writer Jean-Christophe Bailly.
Irène Attinger
Irène Attinger is head of the library and the bookshop at Maison Européenne de la Photographie, in Paris.
Anne-Marie Filaire, Zone de sécurité temporaire
Published by Textuel
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