PRINTEMPS VIVANT, a photobook by Maxime Guedaly

Hello, I am Maxime Guedaly, an artist based in Pantin (northeastern suburbs of Paris), and I am pleased to present you Printemps Vivant, my first photobook. Its publication is supported by the publishing house Classe Moyenne, and its layout has been entrusted to Atelier Baudelaire and the studio Arp is Arp. After having selected the images, defined their order, designed the graphic layout, chosen the paper, the binding, the printing method... We are almost there! By pre-ordering Printemps Vivant now, not only do you allow us to gather the necessary means to launch the printing by the French printer Escourbiac, but above all it is a sign of encouragement. I would be so happy if you were the first to discover this book! The aim is to publish 200 copies, or even 300 if we pass the first stage, to deliver it to you this summer 2023! If you want to know more and you have 3 minutes, sit back and let me tell you what led me to the creation of this book. To do this, we need to go back a few years... Back to 2019 A year marked by numerous movements triggered by citizens all over the world, including in Paris where most of these photos were taken. For some, it was a time of great hope, of emancipation of bodies and minds, and for others, the beginning of a massive collapse. At first, like many, I saw it through my screen. I am particularly attentive to the way the media treat them, whether mainstream or independent. Two different political angles but a common subject that occupies most of the media space: violence, that of the black block on the one hand, of the police on the other. Then, I joined the procession of demonstrations initiated by the yellow vests and those gathering activists against climate change. Very quickly, I wanted to document what was happening to those who took part. I discovered a relationship with the body that reminded me of the one I used to document during parties or artistic performances. A living body, rising up against a world where "everything can collapse". The search for movement What I have come to look for with my camera at protests, in clubs and on stages dedicated to performance is the expression of a common movement, a way of being alive against a background of tumult. My research here tries to bring this look as close as possible to the other, to compose in the proximity imposed by the urban environment, to mingle with the bodies and to stick to the rhythm that sets them in motion. When pushed to its limits, this proximity produces images that decontextualise gestures and open them up to a multiplicity of interpretations. A standing image like a landscape that rises from the rest in which I have seen it only too well. March 17, 2020, everything freezes 900 images later, the year 2019 is coming to an end. I print my images and start editing them. Then the covid crisis causes a general lockdown in France. Caught up in this new time and not knowing when there will be a return to "normal" or "abnormal", the images become the traces of an era suddenly made distant. This feeling makes it all the more necessary to turn them into a book so as not to forget the very special energy that seemed to have evaporated in an instant with the pandemic. Holding together what is falling apart For my first selection of images, I follow a similar approach to the one I take when preparing playlists for the MailTape collective. I choose and link images based on the energy and intensity they make me feel, the formal relationships and associations of ideas that occur from page to page. The book Générations Collapsonautes by Yves Citton and Jacopo Rasmi constitutes a complementary conceptual support: my modus operandi is enriched by it and leads to a montage that connects the interweaving of the city and the body between parties, performances and processions. In the end, I produced an edition of 71 images that will make up the book. From the model to the prototype... At the end of 2020, on an autumn morning, I met Camille Baudelaire in a café along the Canal de l'Ourcq. I have a lot of respect for her work as a graphic designer and her ethics. I put a folder containing my selection on the table and presented the project to her. And so began our happy collaboration. She joined forces with Dimitri Charrel and they began to create the layout of Printemps Vivant. It was conceived as a display, an invitation to wander through the pages in a variety of formats that interact freely with each other. Sandrine Marc's Change plus vite que le coeur and Wolfgang Tillmans' Wako Books were important references during these reflections. A few months later, two prototypes, resulting from a collaboration with the printer Launay and the binding workshop Dreieck, were produced. ... then to publishing I discovered the book Infra, by Rebecca Topakian, and found in it an echo of my research. I was struck by the intensity of her ecstatic portraits. It is Marie Lamassa and Romain Pruvost who are carrying this project through their publishing house Classe Moyenne. This prompted me to show them the prototype of Printemps vivant. We then studied the paths that would allow us to go from a prototype to a publication, and a few months later we were ready for this crucial step that would allow us to launch Printemps Vivant in the best possible conditions. About Maxime Guedaly "Focused on the place of the human being within society and its direct interaction with urbanism, Maxime Guedaly has been building up a documentary photographic archive for ten years. A self-taught photographer with an engineering background, he builds his projects from the archives he has created. Selected, ordered and put in relation according to their destination, these images take place in the public space and in spaces of diffusion open to all. The formal association of several image regimes constitutes a starting point for a reflection on the physical and political movements of communities engaged in society, whether they are from a cultural milieu linked to the performing arts or the world of associations. " Constance Heilmann-Herat, exhibition curator About Classe Moyenne éditions "Since 2017, we have been publishing artists' books that we design in close collaboration with their authors. We chose this project for its ethical commitment and its author's political and choreographic view of bodies in struggle." Marie Lamassa and Romain Pruvost, founders of Classe moyenne éditions