PARIS.- Sophie Ristelhueber (born 1949) lives in Paris, where she studied literature and worked as a journalist before deciding to devote herself to photography.

For more than twenty years now, she has been working on the notion of the territory and its history, by paying special attention to ruins and the traces left by man in places devastated by war. Working far from conventional photojournalism, she focuses on revealing events and the marks of history, both on bodies and on landscapes. She reveals the wounds and scars that are the physical chronicle of trauma.

In this, her first major exhibition in France, Jeu de Paume will present a number of her series – “Beirut,” “Vulaines,” “Fact,” "Eleven Blowups" together with two new films, one of them specially conceived for the show.

Since the early 1980s, Sophie Ristelhueber has been one of the most original and significant proponents of a new approach that has moved documentary photography towards into a more poetical, political and aesthetic territory. This shift in values, applied to the codes of representation of the real, has significantly changed the space in which the conception, production and reception of photographic images are negotiated.

Indeed, most of Ristelhueber’s pieces force viewers out of their passive role of observer, turning them into witnesses and judges of the tension that is created between the visually obvious, truth and representation. Ristelhueber’s highly structured work is inscribed in this same interstitial space, at the frontier between proof and verdict, or between index and doubt.

The artist thus simultaneously explores several different territories of conflict: those where the politics of the representation of a given space and place are renegotiated, and those where viewers are torn between their personal experience, their capacity for critical judgement and the pressure exerted by the dominant politics of representation.

In this crossfire, between what we see and what we know, Ristelhueber’s images make no attempt to impose a judgement or organise our looking, but seek, rather, to elaborate multiple narratives that offer a range of stimulating new possibilities. Image after image, project by project, fundamental themes such as the perturbation of memory, the insanity of power and the obscenity of human suffering are explored not from the angle of fatality or excess, but in relation to their discreet inscription in the inexorable process of life. Or, to quote Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas, as if they were “little serious afflictions.”