For its alleged transparency to reality, photography is expected to convey nothing more than the things whose manifest presence it has recorded. But what if photography had as much—if not more—of a vocation to make something that isn’t there visible? This is the question that runs through the photographic series Benoît Grimbert has, since the early 2010s, devoted to musical figures, in connection with the places where they lived. In these projects, the photographs are not literal illustrations of this geo-biographical information. In an investigative mode, they are meant to be evocative of the atmospheres suggested by the music and the song lyrics, the people and the historical context to which they refer; they also question what the contemporary landscape is likely to conjure up of these periods. Three of these projects have been published by Bartleby & Co. (Brussels): Lips That Would Kiss (dedicated to Ian Curtis/Joy Division, Manchester, 2011), Neuköln “Heroes” (Bowie/Berlin, 2013)—in collaboration with Hannah Darabi—, and Nuclear Winter (Nico in Manchester, 2018). A set of photographs devoted to the “industrial” band Throbbing Gristle and Hackney was the subject of his thesis in Sciences and Technologies of the Arts, specializing in Visual Arts and Photography: Atrocity Exhibition. Throbbing Gristle in Hackney (London, 1975-1981). A photographic investigation (Paris 8, 2023). Conducted over a ten-year period, his project dedicated to Jim Morrison, Charles Manson, and California of the 1960s was exhibited at FOTOHOF (Salzburg) in 2024. A book combining photographs and text is forthcoming.

Benoît Grimbert's early photographic series also addressed how time and history are inscribed in the urban landscape. Striving to create tension between the different temporal layers of the contemporary city, he notably photographed, in this vein, the landscapes of post-war reconstruction in Normandy (Normandie, paysages de la reconstruction, Le Point du Jour, 2006), London’s northern ring road (A406 – North Circular Road, exhibited at the Mois de la photographie in Paris, 2008), and, following Paul Graham, along the Great North Road (2006-2009).

Solo Exhibitions

Publications 

Collections

Research

Grants

• 2024: Horse Latitudes. Grant for an exhibition abroad (Austria), Institut Français
  
• 2017–2018: Deux ou trois choses (in collaboration with Hannah Darabi), Les regards du Grand Paris, Cnap / Ateliers Médicis
  
• 2017: The Return of the Durutti Column, support for contemporary documentary photography, Cnap
  

Teaching