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 18 June - 14 September 2008 L'envers de soi (The others side of the self) includes some of the most significant work from the photographic career of Sophie Elbaz. As a photojournalist for Reuter and Sygma from 1986 to 1985, she covered some major events which shaped her vision, as evidenced in Contre toute attente,a photographic essay on the subject of Bosnian refugees. In 1995, she stopped working for the press and discovered Cuba. Her work on the Garcia Lorca, the Havana Opera House, pays tribute to the resilience of an inward-looking world. More recently she produced a trilogy entitled Aleyo, on the theme of the Sacred, the Body, and Politics. Cuba gradually became a workshop for her imagination, providing her with both the material and the opportunity for a "writing of the Self" capable of revealing the 'other side' of things, beyond surface appearances. Also part of the exhibition is Sophie Elbaz's first film, an account of her search for the Sephardic roots on her father's side of the family. "A life is more than just a series of stops and starts. It is constructed gradually over time, via an acceptance of change, distortion and transmutation. This is how a life's evolution is formed. For this reason, rather than designing this show as a corpus representing the state of my thoughts and investigations at a given point, I have made it reflect key stages on the road I have followed as a photographer. Although the world at large has been the setting for my humanistic work, I had to explore my inner self to understand that I had not merely been projecting my own suffering onto that world: Death Row, incest in the US, mass rape in Bosnia, the Romanian revolution, the release of Nelson Mandela, refugee camps in Rwanda. Outcasts were my subjects throughout my time at the Sygma agency. Contre Toute Attente, the set of pictures I made during the conflict in former Yougoslavia, is presented at the beginning of the exhibition. In 1995, I stopped being a reporter and stepped onto Cuban soil for the first time. My own roots and the years I spent in Mexico, in Africa, in India and in the USA no doubt prepared me to be receptive without being judgmental. This meant I was able to go beyond the rationality of certainty, throwing myself into a world inspired by Alejo Carpentier, Wilfredo Lam and Mendive. Although my encounter with the Cuban soul was in some ways a pretext (in the same way Michel Leiris makes Africa into a metaphor for writing on the Self, or of a field of energy), it also enabled me to make the necessary inner journey to my African-ness and to my psyche. It became possible for me to use a new idiom of light against the backdrop of my own imagination. From 1995 to 1999, I photographed the Lorca theatre in the purist black and white tradition: this was a lesson in resilience and humility at the Havana Opera House. Today, my most recent work Aleyo is a cry for life coloured with the hues of a land that is essential to me, bearing witness to a heritage that had, until recently, withstood the assaults of colonisation and 50 years of Marxist-Leninist thought. To conclude this quest for my origins, I am also presenting my first film, which I made in late 2007 in Constantine, Algeria, and which traces the history of my grandfather, Jonathan Elbaz." Sophie Elbaz Visits : Guided visits are available for subscribers, groups and schools. For more information see "Events/Guided visits to exhibitions". Catalogue : A catalogue is available, published by Images En Manuvres. For more information, see "Books and Films/Books". 
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