ALAIN ROUX
ÉDITIONS FP&CF, 2022

”The objects that we have throughout our lives are so many markers of the times and eras that we go through, that they alone reveal the personalities of their owners.

Alain Roux, a French photographer established in Germany, testifies in “Birkenhof” to this sentimental attachment to things: in 2013, he left Berlin with his family to settle in his wife’s family home, in Birkenhof, a hamlet located a hour by train from Munich. The 19th century building, a former Bavarian farm, imposes itself by its size and the green land that surrounds it. When entering the premises for the first time, the photographer is struck by the number of objects accumulated throughout the last century.

Time has frozen, each room is full of a heap of “things”, which make up the strata of a bygone era. Initially thinking of living there for a year, to break with Berlin’s urban life, the family has still not left and is living there for its ninth consecutive year. So much time spent documenting each room of the house, retracing the paths and lives of these “ghosts” who have inhabited the walls of this typical building.

However, the book does not present a simple succession of photographed objects like a catalogue. Beyond the still lifes of the past mingle with snapshots of current life, made of simple moments of daily life with the family. This collection invites you to take a real graphic dive into a closed universe, the house, while inviting the reader to follow a framework that evokes our time in the broad sense.

Witness distanced from a long history which is not totally his own, Alain Roux unearths whole sections of the past century and reconciles his personal and graphic vision with the great History which has shaped the world and which continues to influence our lives today.”
(Publisher’s note)

16 x 23 cm
324 pages

STATE: VERY GOOD