PARIS.- Over the course of two years, Astrid and Pierre openly placed their lives before the panoramic gaze of photographer Michael von Graffenried, moving from love to addiction. This long-term series unfolds an intimate approach to their story, attentive to gestures, bonds, and fragilities. By giving a human face to a reality often marginalized, the work questions its place within the public sphere.

In 1987, while photographing the world’s first supervised drug consumption room in Bern for the harm-reduction association Réseau Contact, Michael von Graffenried began building the relationships of trust that would later anchor "COCAINELOVE" at the heart of a public-health crisis marked by HIV, overdoses, and the open drug scenes of the Platzspitz ('Needle Park') in Zurich.

It was in this context that Graffenried met Astrid and Pierre: a young couple bound together by love as much as by addiction. For eighteen months, he followed them through tenderness and violence, incarceration, relapse, and survival. He documented their relationship at eye level, revealing not spectacle but proximity. Astrid died of an overdose in 2008 at the age of thirty-six. Pierre was stabbed to death by a dealer friend in 2018.

In 2005, rather than presenting this work in a museum, Graffenried installed thirty large panoramic photographs on public advertising billboards across Switzerland before bringing them together at the former Platzspitz site. Returning these images to the street was an act of visibility and responsibility: Astrid and Pierre had agreed to show their faces, their names, and their story. The series was later exhibited as part of Graffenried’s retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris in 2010.

At a time when public policies in France increasingly tend to criminalize drug use rather than address it as a public-health issue, "COCAINELOVE" remains strikingly relevant. While the pioneering harm-reduction policies implemented in Switzerland in the late 1980s and 1990s, from supervised consumption rooms to large-scale substitution programs and medically prescribed heroin, have become international reference points, the debate remains contentious in France, where the first supervised consumption room opened only in 2016.

Revisiting this series today means making visible what society once preferred not to see. It is not only the portrait of a couple, but a way of understanding issues that remain urgent: care, public policy, and the humanity of those living at the margins. "COCAINELOVE" is a living archive. Twenty years on, it still speaks.

Founded in 2021 at the initiative of photographer Michael von Graffenried (b. 1957), ESPACE MVG is dedicated to retracing and showcasing fifty years of photographic creation. Located in the house where Camille Claudel once worked, near William Klein’s former studio, the space presents and progressively reorganizes Graffenried’s complete body of work. Exhibitions are enriched by prints from his personal collection, often acquired through exchanges with other photographers. While the Paris studio forms the core of ESPACE MVG, temporary exhibitions are also presented in other cities, notably Geneva, Bern, and Marseille. In the long term, ESPACE MVG aims to become a platform for collaboration, open to contemporary photography and artistic exchange.