By photographing street scenes and episodes of everyday life, he has captured the extraordinary banality and ordinary singularity of a country that does not hesitate to mix genres and its alcohols with water. Whisky, sake, shoch� and umeshu can all be served as mizuwari. This is a typically Japanese way of prolonging the intoxication and diluting the often burdensome daily routine, by increasing the number of nomikai, 'drinking get-togethers' organised between colleagues from the same company, the emblematic salarymen of the Archipelago.
As a participant in these meetings in the bars of Golden Gai, Yurakusho and Shibuya, Bruno Labarb�re got up close to the faces, tracked down the glances, observed the sleeping bodies until the early hours of the morning, and let himself be bewitched by the blurred shadows. A true immersion in Japanese society, this work offers a snapshot of its most typical features. All lovers of Japan will recognise it, and all others, whether or not they are fascinated by this elusive culture, will be able to discover it, unvarnished and unpretentious, to be consumed without moderation.
Born in Thailand in 1987, living in France since 1992, Bruno Labarbère initially intended for a career as an automobile designer-engineer. His life takes a radical turn when he buys, by chance, his first camera in 2007. Realizing that the applied mathematics is not made for him and he can do anything as well find in photography this mixture of art and technicality which fascinates him, he leaves his university in Bordeaux and enrolls in photography studies in Paris... but never finished his studies, preferring to wander around in the streets of Paris, his camera in hand. Thanks to the chance of meetings, often in bars, he is, from 2010 to 2020, in turn a salesman in Leica Store, head of the photographic section of the LesNumériques site, journalist for the French magazines Réponses Photo then Le Monde de la Photo. A decade on the technical side of still photography by the Covid-19 pandemic. The first confinement is an opportunity to take the time to finally sort out your photographic archives, where Parisian nights rub shoulders with the streets of Japan, where he went for the first time in 2011 and which he has since considered his third country of adoption. Locked up like millions of others, the (re) discovery of these photos gives him the impression of traveling to this Tokyo night whose doors will remain closed to foreigners for several years. From images to memories, a story is reconstructed. Bruno Labarbère then shows his work to photographers, booksellers, journalists, editors, and assimilates each of the critiques. While the clichés were not premeditated, everyone sees a different artistic reference: Daido Moriyama for spontaneity, William Klein for life scenes, Ed van der Elsken for shadow play. Over the course of feedback, the project evolves until it becomes this book to be published by Hemeria editions.
Admitted in residence to the French Festival Planches Contact 2022 as part of the Springboard for Young Talents, he exhibited at the end of 2022 at the Musée des Franciscaines in Deauville, Normandy: a nighttime stroll through the city's bars...
Franco-Belgian artist, photographer-visual artist and director, originally Chinese, Diana Lui has lived and worked in Paris for 25 years. She uses several mediums (photography, painting, installation, performance, video) to produce artistic work inspired by its history personal and which seeks to document the human soul through an "intimate/psychological/anthropological" approach which questions identity and origins, in the wake of Diane Arbus.
At the same time, she regularly works for French and international media for portrait or fashion photographs.
