Benoît Grimbert

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Horse Latitudes 

Horse Latitudes, 2014–2025
120 photograph, text collage
Fotohof exhibition


“If ‘documentary photography’ according to Walker Evans can literally be limited to the depiction of corpses or accidents (in the course of police forensics), then Benoît Grimbert's seemingly documentary images, despite their superficially sober style, are historically located in a completely different context. Because the dead make space for themselves in these pictures in a different way, so that below their somewhat distanced surface a legacy of spiritualist ghost photography can perhaps be sensed.” 


Peter Schreiner

Come on baby, gonna take a little ride
Goin’ down by the ocean side
Gonna get real close
Get real tight
Baby gonna drown tonight –
Goin’ down, down, down


The Doors, Moonlight Drive, 1967
Did Jim Morrison ever cross paths with Charles Manson?

Since the Doors singer was the main focus of this photographic investigation, carried out mainly in Los Angeles and California, the question may seem secondary, if not anecdotal. However, even if there is no evidence with which to provide an answer, this does not make it any less relevant. Joan Didion writes in The White Album (1) that the people she knew in Los Angeles thought that “the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive travelled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.” Indeed, it is precisely this paranoia that is reflected in the Doors’ songs and Jim Morrison’s provocative and erratic personality.  In his book about the band, historian Greil Marcus remarks: “Already in 1968, the Doors were performing not freedom but its disappearance. This is what is terrifying: the notion that the Sixties was no grand, simple, romantic time to sell others as a nice place to visit, but a place, even as it is created, people know they can never really inhabit, and never escape.”(2) By revealing what lies beyond the illusion of an idyllic world celebrated by the upbeat Beach Boys, the Cielo Drive and Waverly Drive murders had in retrospect legitimized and deciphered the malaise of an increasingly divided society confronted with tension both at home and abroad, with the bitter struggle for civil rights on the one hand, and the Vietnam War on the other. Conversely, it’s hard not to see in Morrison’s criminal hitchhiker in HWY (Highway), the fictional film he made just a few weeks before the murders, a kind of foreshadowing, if not a genuine premonition, of the bloody carnage to come. The mirror game between Jim Morrison and Charles Manson not only refers to the same Zeitgeist, the same “spirit of the age”, but also stems from the fact that they both embodied the counterculture figure of the rebel—one as a poet and showman, the other as an unrepentant criminal and pseudo-conspirator.Text by Benoît Grimbert

(1) Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).

(2) Greil Marcus, The Doors, A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years (London: Faber and Faber, 2011).



Horse Latitudes

Atrocity Exhibition 

2023

The Return of the Durutti Column

2018

Nuclear Winter

Deux ou trois choses

2018

Space Oddity 

2017

Neuköln “Heroes”

2013

Lips that Would Kiss

2011

Stains 

2011

A1, the Great North Road

2009

A406, North Circular Road 

2008

Normandie

2006

Nostalghia 

2004

Verso 

2002