This book tells a very beautiful love story: Le livre de Patricia!
This is the love story of Patrícia Almeida and David-Alexandre Gueniot.
When the Portuguese photographer Patrícia Almeida died in November 2017, she left an unfinished book project on a personal history of photography. Months before, she had started to collect documents on photography, manuals, finding her first photographs.
On the day of her death, the funeral director requested a portrait for the wake. He had no idea what problem he was raising.
Which picture to choose? Which person to show? This person weakened by illness or this person ten years younger, full of life? How to summarize, or reduce, or compress a person in a single image? In the “last image”?
Le Livre de Patricia recounts the search for this impossible image, this attempt to find an “ontological photograph”, in which the reality of the person coincides with the truth of her being.
An image capable of merging physics with metaphysics.
The book presents the practical and theoretical circumstances of this research. The author revisits the unfinished project of the photographer and confronts it with the production of her image as identity, as memory, as absence, as ghost.
David-Alexandre Guéniot, born in 1972 in Caen, is a publisher in Lisbon. After training in political science and philosophy, in the 1990s he met the Portuguese choreographer João Fiadeiro and became interested in contemporary dance. He worked as a theater programmer in Geneva, then administrator of a dance company and director of an artistic residency center in Lisbon. In 2003, he met the Portuguese photographer Patrícia Almeida and collaborated in the preparation and production of her exhibitions and books. In 2011, they decided to found the publishing house GHOST (acronym for Guest and Host) in order to give substance to books created by artists.
Patrícia Almeida (Lisbon, 1970-2017)
Trained in History at the Universidade Nova in Lisbon and in photography at Goldsmiths College in London, her work explores the language of documentary photography as a territory of research and artistic creation. After having first produced works that question the relationship of the individual with urban space, she became interested starting 2011 in the uses of photography in a political and biographical context (My life will change, 2015). In her exhibitions, various mediums frequently coexisted: photographs, texts, posters, newspapers, videos and slide shows.
These projects were also very often thought of as books or artist publications.
In 2011, she founded the GHOST publishing house with David-Alexandre Guéniot.
David-Alexandre Guéniot & Patrícia Almeida : Le livre de Patrícia
Loco editions in co-edition with Ghost editions
Graphics: Leo Favier
ISBN: 978-2-8431-4076-1
13 x 18cm
304 pages
approximately 200 color reproductions
www.editionsloco.com
