Anne-Lise Broyer
Born 1975, Lons-le-Saunier, France. Lives and works in Paris, France.
In 2023, Anne-Lise Broyer was awarded the inaugural residency at the Musée de l’Armée – Hôtel national des Invalides, followed by the Niépce Gens d’images Prize in 2024. For more than twenty-five years, she has developed a photographic practice that can be described as an experience of literature through the gaze, closely linking reading and the emergence of the image. She approaches her series as a writer does language, in a language that is spoken and heard through the eye. Her images are printed on matte paper (that of the novel). They evoke a distant reality, left undisturbed. She teaches at the École européenne supérieure d’art de Bretagne (EESAB), Lorient.
In the fault lines of Mediterranean landscapes, immemorial time intertwines with the possibility of a future, as well as a question: Is this where we once lived? This line of inquiry, which began Anne‑Lise Broyer’s long‑term project, suggests geographic and historical dimensions and a secret memory. She responds with a vast body of photographic work in muted gray tones, bringing imagination and reality into tension: a portrait of a space in negative. The Mediterranean becomes both vantage point and horizon. The photographer stands at the center of an inverted expanse, within a sea steeped in stories and journeys—this primordial, mythological sea turned shroud. Her images of nearly abstract seascapes run across ancient and modern ruins alike. Beginning in Carthage, her singular gaze unfolds across the Mediterranean through drifting and suspension, from Algiers to Beirut, from Tipasa to Baalbek, through Pompeii, Marseille and Caesarea…The names unfold with literary and legendary resonance. Moving between calm and violence, the artist’s photographic song weaves the temporalities of these contemporary or imagined places together with the force of elegy, returning them to the flow of life. The faces, in marble or flesh, are part of the same living humanity, both vibrant and stilled; this grey—is it water?— moving back and forth, covering the land and receding again, an endless motion of the gaze refusing to settle, like a tide in retreat. The movement of the wave mirrors that of the images themselves, whose surface, like that of the sea, reflects our buried and shifting memory. In a time saturated with tensions, this work calls for pause and withdrawal; it invites us to find a stance, a position of watchfulness or vigilance. From this position, Broyer draws a strength grounded in possibility and indeterminacy.
Sally Bonn
Venue
Abbaye de Montmajour
Exhibition produced by the Rencontres d’Arles.
Exhibition presented as part of the Saison Méditerranée 2026.
Prints
La Chambre Noire, Paris
Framing
Circad, Paris
Publication
Méditerranée. Est-ce là que l’on habitait ?, delpire & co, 2026.
