Douro Editions "Through reading, we become absent from ourselves and our own lives." Alphonse Karr
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret is a poet, writer, and critic of contemporary literature and art. He is also a photographer (see in de la Photographie, OpenEye, Le Littéraire, Turbulence Vidéo, Esprit, TK21, etc.). He has published a large number of books: poetry, short texts, essays on art and literature, including "Extinctions" about Beckett, published by Douro.
Faced with productivist or amateur photographers who leave the world as desolate as it is conventional, rare creators become irreplaceable. Supplementing the image on one hand, diminishing reality on the other, these photographers, in their options, avoid the play of blinding bursts of light. They hunt for shadows. For them, seeing less shows more. And this, in diverse fields: ethical, social, political, and aesthetic, where photography no longer copies reality: it transforms it. Gathered here are the creators who respond to Barthes's "Camera Lucida." In "The Dark Room," the windows open onto dark and sharp territories. The photographers leave the work in black—but sometimes not without detours. Their visions never suggest collapses, but perspectives through new sediments for another beauty. Publication: June 2, 2025 Order Press Release
"Extinctions" presents Beckett's strategies for leading beings to the point of their impossibility of existing and their emptiness. The places of the body, like those of space and time, undergo—through fiction, poetry, film, television, and radio—everything that collapses, then fades and extinguishes through the power of the imagination. The essay, through a carefully chosen numbering, reveals Beckett's profoundly innovative and creative languages for expressing the exhaustion of meaning. The strategies of the imagination eliminate all illusory revelation. Two quotes are emblematic of this paradoxical work between the impossibility of saying and erasure: from "in the beginning was the pun" to "Enough with the images," where only the music of silence in the dark remains. Publication: September 1, 2024 Order Press release
The author becomes a sharp observer of the supposed upheavals that run through the existence of a hero whose posterity is cultivated during his lifetime - which is much more invigorating. This author has found in his hero without ever having met him the perfect echo of Montaigne's revisited formula on friendship: "Because it was him, because it was me." In short, for the latter, Cauda remains the only master. The greatest reverence to be accorded him is his tearing to pieces (by a butcher). Publication: January 2, 2022 Order
