Pierre-Elie de Pibrac

Pierre-Elie
de Pibrac

Pierre-Elie de Pibrac

Dans les coulisses de l'Opéra de Paris: Analogia

biography

Pierre-Elie de Pibrac is a French photographer, born in Paris in 1983.

His first major series was born in 2010 in New York from a work on perception and the photographic object. Entitled American Showcase and The Frontiers of Perception, it is the subject of a book : American Showcase, published by Archibooks. Pierre-Elie de Pibrac is already developing what has become his trademark : beyond the subject matter, the photographer seeks to evolve the image, inventing new concepts to create his own language. In 2012, following a report made two years earlier in the United States, Pierre-Elie composed the Real Life Super Heroes (RLSH) series, which features the famous American phenomenon of “real life superheroes”. On this occasion, a book entitled Real Life Super Heroes is published by PapelArt / Serious Publishing. Loving to move from one universe to another, the photographer decides, during the 2013-2014 season, a key year that marks the transition from the direction of dance from Brigitte Lefèvre to Benjamin Millepied, to follow the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet. Immersed in the life of the company and behind the scenes of the Garnier and Bastille operas, he sensitively adapts his focus to the subject matter. He develops his project through three photographic approaches that echo each other: reportage, pictorial abstraction and staging, entitled Confidences, Catharsis and Analogia. The result was a book entitled In Situ – dans les coulisses de l’Opéra de Paris published by Clémentine de la Féronnière. In order to deepen his project he returned to the Paris Opera to follow Benjamin Millepied’s first steps in the 2014-2015 season.

In 2016 and 2017, Pierre-Elie de Pibrac went to live in Cuba for 8 months to work on the identity of Cubans through the prism of sugar. He came back with 2 series about an unknown Cuba and a neglected population (Desmemoria and Guajiros). This work has won the Levallois Prize in 2018. A book entitled Desmemoria, published by the prestigious Xavier Barral publishing house, was released in 2019 and won the HIP 2020 Photographic Book Award in the category “reportage and history”. A third, more universal series made in Cuba and finalized in France will be released in 2021.

In 2019 and 2020, he went to Japan for almost a year to carry out his new project, Hakanai Sonzai, which deals with the sensitivity for the ephemeral of the Japanese, vanity and the impermanence of things in Japanese culture. This is the second part of his trilogy on resilience that he started in Cuba with Desmemoria. Pierre-Elie has been exhibited all over the world (France, Japan, Mexico, USA, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Cuba) through numerous galleries as well as major fairs and festivals (Kyotography, Paris Photo Paris, Paris Photo Los Angeles, Cutlog, Zona Maco, AAF de Bruxelles, MAP, Paris Show Off, Lille Art Fair, Metz Art Fair).

His work has entered many public and private collections.

Series

Mono no Aware, 2023

The expression Mono no Aware refers to the emotion as the emotion that seizes us when faced with inanimate objects or transitory nature: with this series, Pierre-Elie de Pibrac delicately underlines the fragility of things and their melancholy.

Home-Réalisations Pierre-Elie de Pibrac séries

Hakanai Sonzai, 2023

Série | Between December 2019 and August 2020, Pierre-Élie de Pibrac embarks on a journey to Japan that will give life to the serie, Hakanai Sonzai. Meaning "I myself feel like an ephemeral creature", this series aims to show, through the particular, a specifically Japanese aesthetic and collective ideology.