DENIS MALARTRE
Born in 1952 in Caen, Denis Malartre moved to Paris in 1970 at the age of 18. He witnessed firsthand the emergence of modern photography in the 1970s and 1980s, in a context shaped by the influence of Henri Cartier-Bresson and the rise of auteur photography in France. In 1981, he joined the Viva agency, a collective founded a decade earlier by eight photographers. More than a press agency, Viva was a space for experimentation and artistic affirmation. There, Malartre found the freedom to pursue a practice detached from traditional reportage, breaking away from classical narrative forms.
Early on, he turned away from illustrative photography. His vision was influenced by modern and contemporary art, particularly by the Supports/Surfaces movement, which considered painting itself as the subject of painting. Malartre transposed this radical approach to photography, which he conceived not as a medium of representation, but as an object in its own right.
This direction took a decisive turn during a trip to New York in 1986. Upon his return, he wrote a manifesto and began a series of photographic experiments that led him to scratch negatives, draw lines across strips, and deconstruct the sensitive surface of the image.
This intense period gave rise to the series Les Objectales: a body of non-figurative works produced between 1986 and 1988, guided by an obsessive logic of installations and repeated shots. Alongside it, he self-published a confidential book, Tue-mouches, combining text and image. This plastic exploration of photography brought him to a voluntary dead end: in 1988, he ceased all photographic production.
Nearly three decades later, he began to consider reviving this forgotten work. But struck by an aggressive cancer, Denis Malartre died in 2017 while preparing an exhibition. He left behind a singular body of work, both plastic and conceptual, in the lineage of Supports/Surfaces. The silver prints of the time, produced by his own hand, stand as rare testimony to a form of photography conceived as pure form—pushing against its own limits in a profoundly singular gesture.
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