Distant dreams
Perspectives on the Fnac Photographic Collection
With a text by Nathacha Appanah
Curation: Fannie Escoulen, Laure Augustins
Rencontres d’Arles
July 6, 2026 – October 4, 2026
This exhibition, which brings together a large number of photographers, features prints by Bruno Boudjelal, Denis Dailleux, Bernard Descamps, Claudine Doury, Stéphane Duroy, Françoise Huguier, Gérard Rondeau, Patrick Taberna, Guillaume Zuili.
“What are the stories told by photos made of? Do they have ingredients that change over time—the grain of the years, the light that yellows and sometimes bursts into spangles, the edges that soften like the characters, the hidden details that emerge?
Do they have, like books, the ability to unfold within us, to speak to us as if they existed for our eyes alone? Do they patiently wait for us to find out, ultimately, how they resemble us, how they are the mirror of our sorrows and our hopes?”
Nathacha Appanah,
Nos rêves lointains (Distant Dreams), Gallimard, 2026.
From its inception, Fnac was driven by its founders’ commitment to photography, assembling one of the most significant corporate photography collections in France in 1978. Spanning nearly a century in the history of the medium, the 1,800 prints that make up the collection are held at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce.
This exhibition offers a new reading of this collection. Through one hundred images and across several decades, it leads us to the outer reaches of the territories explored by photographers, into the strength of their connection to the landscape and their encounter with “the other, at once near and distant”.1
In response to the images, writer Nathacha Appanah contributes an original literary work. Her words weave alternative narratives and open unexpected paths through the exhibition, giving it a new poetic dimension. Text and image enter into dialogue, intertwine, and at times collide, giving the collection new momentum.
Movement is intrinsic to photography, whether in physical travel or in the imagination, as suggested by GLADYS’ photograph, Petit Navire [Small Ship], a dreamlike metaphor for a departure that never quite takes place.
Like points on a map, these images form a journey shaped by waiting, roads, seas, and desert horizons, by faces and shared stories. From the vast landscapes captured by Sigurgeir Sigurjonsson and Françoise Huguier to the contemplative wanderings of Antoine d’Agata and Jair Lanes, a perceptual mapping of the world emerges—marked by the photographer’s experience and by the desire to find, elsewhere, another way of being in the world.
Fannie Escoulen
© Françoise Huguier / VU’
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