The fifth edition of the Carte Blanche PMU has just been published by Filigranes. With a preface by Agnès Desarthe, the work features a selection of photographs taken by Léa Habourdin and Thibault Brunet last summer as part of their project about gamblers in Pas-de-Calais in northern France. Entitled Les Immobiles, the series wii be on display through January 25th at Le BAL in Paris.
Although it has always been part of our landscape, the PMU Café calls to mind a distant and vaguely abstract world embodied by scattered images gleaned over the years: smoke-filled rooms filled with a few busy regulars, the names of horses called out like abstract aphorisms, people lining up at the counters…
From the very start, it seemed natural to begin from these more or less fantasized images and, instead of attempting to create a documentary record, to rely instead on metaphor .
We spent two months immersed in the small towns of Pas-de-Calais in cafés called Le Rallye, Le Café du Rond-Point, L’Alhambra, La Cravache d’Or, Le Gallia. They taught us to play, how to decipher the racing guide, how to win and lose. They gave us advice, gently poked fun at our ignorance, sometimes got annoyed by our questions. We listened to their surreal and sometimes tragic stories standing at the counter. We saw some major wins, some brilliant intuition, some miraculous horses, money made and lost. In short, we shared their lives. Fully. Stories of hunting, obedient dogs, tasteless jokes, a rush of blood to the head, to the heart—gambling was part of our lives, day after day. That’s how we became regulars, and friends.
One day, a pigeon breeder showed us his nursery, a few steps from the PMU, and explained pigeon racing as he showed his best, most athletic pigeons. We were hurled into a world of racing, speed, precisions… Then we had to leave. The man was on parole and wore a tracking device around his ankle. “I’m banded like my pigeons,” he said. “I have to come home at night.”
—Léa et Thibault
Patrick Le Bescont, director of Éditions Filigranes, shot a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the book.
BOOK
Les Immobiles
Léa Habourdin & Thibault Brunet : Carte blanche PMU 2014
PMU / Le Bal / Filigranes
Release : January 14th, 2015
French
ISBN : 978-2-35046-341-4
190 x 250mm
136 pages
74 photographs duotone & color
25€
http://www.filigranes.com
EXHIBITION
Les Immobiles
Léa Habourdin and Thibault Brunet : Carte blanche PMU 2014
14 – 25 january 2015
Le BAL
6, Impasse de la Défense
75018 Paris
France
http://www.le-bal.fr
http://carteblanchepmu.fr
