JEAN-LUC BERTINI EXHIBITION | MODERNE ART FAIR 2025

23—26 OCT. 2025 / Place de la Concorde
On the occasion of Modern Art Fair 2025, two series of images will be partially exhibited, taken from the following two books:
AMÉRICAINES SOLITUDES, Actes Sud, 2020
CONTEMPLATIONS ITALIENNES, Robert Laffont / Le Tripode, 2025

Jean-Luc Bertini is a Franco-Italian independent photographer born in 1969. Author of several books on the United States, he notably published Américaines Solitudes with Actes Sud in 2020. This series was exhibited at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles in 2021, and part of it entered the collections of the Department of Prints and Photography of the BNF. His work is regularly shown in festivals and galleries.

His upcoming book, Contemplations Italiennes, will be released this fall by Robert Laffont / Le Tripode.

Américaines Solitudes, Actes Sud, 2020 (Texts by Gilles Mora and Richard Ford)
With Américaines Solitudes, Jean-Luc Bertini traveled across the United States over ten years, questioning the place of human beings within its immense landscapes. While his series seeks to show how Americans occupy their space—and interrogates their excess in doing so, which often generates anonymity and solitude—it also represents for him an intimate, existential experience, “which one can only imagine as a reflection of that of his subjects,” in the words of historian Gilles Mora, who wrote the afterword. Perhaps this is why these solitudes echo each other like in a hall of mirrors. In this subtle balance between the contemporary photographer and contemporary America, one finds that humanist touch inherited from the French tradition, which allows him to sidestep the “American photographic tableau.”

And because solitude fosters observation, it predisposes the photographer to believe in visions, orchestrations, and mirages, so that these images seem to transcend the ordinary scenes they capture. What great literature can achieve through words—“to give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe”—is not, as the American writer Richard Ford notes in his introductory text, “so different from what great photographers can do through images.”

Contemplations Italiennes, Robert Laffont / Le Tripode, 2025 (Text by Pierre Michon)
Following the creation of the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris at the beginning of the 19th century, monumental cemeteries began to appear throughout Europe, and particularly in Italy. In this country where sculpture reigns supreme, cemeteries on the outskirts of cities became adorned with statues, mausoleums, and chapels, while artists competed in inventiveness and genius to satisfy a newfound thirst for eternity. Photographer Jean-Luc Bertini patiently explored these little-known cemeteries, sometimes threatened with abandonment, in search of funerary beauties that time has touched with an unexpected refinement. The result of numerous journeys, Contemplations Italiennes reveals for the first time these sumptuous open-air museums, where art addresses the enigma of death—sometimes with modesty, sometimes with exuberant flourish.

CONTACT : 
Photographe Jean-Luc Bertini
jeanlucbertini.com