Paris. In 2025, the MYOP agency celebrated its 20th anniversary with an exhibition at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles and the publication of a book with Hoëbeke. “ How can we report on a collective adventure through the eyes of twenty photographers? How can we read thousands of images accumulated in the opacity of time and retain only an infinitesimal fragment? “, asked curator Fannie Escoulen in the foreword to the monograph co-signed with the BAL scenographer, Cyril Delhomme.
In the spaces on the ground floor of the city’s former municipal showers, a portrait of the collective, its structure and its foundations, took shape through a first room devoted to the works and manifestos published since the creation in 2005 by Guillaume Binet and Lionel Charrier of the agency, joined by the photographer, visual artist and musician Oan Kim. The double projection, on both sides which followed, showed chronologically, year by year, the reports and other works carried out. In short, a summary exhibition of what, today, unites the twenty members that MYOP has today.
A story about the world
In Paris, at the Carré de Baudouin, the agency chose a completely different exhibition by entrusting the curatorship to one of their own, Michel Slomka, the last photographer to join the agency, in 2022, with Laurence Geai, Chloé Sharrock and Adrienne Surprenant. This is not the first time that the collective has entrusted the curating of an exhibition to one of its members. Olivier Monge signed “Back to Black” in 2021-2022, Adrienne Surprenant and Stéphane Lagoutte “Manifesto – They were suddenly a crowd” at the Rencontres d’Arles 2023.
“The Arles exhibition was not adaptable to the spaces of the Carré de Baudouin and resuming the film and publishing books would have diluted Michel’s remarks relating to our vision of the world and the battles that we want to wage”, explains Stéphane Lagoutte, director of the agency. The exhibition designed by Michel Slomka, on the two levels of the cultural center of the town hall of the 20th arrondissement, is not a retrospective but a visual narrative story constructed from a questioning – “How to inhabit the world, deal with disaster and invent desirable futures? »– and motifs common to all photographers, taken from their archives whether relating to wars, struggles, resistance, ideals or global warming, nature or even the intimate.
Zen Lefort, “Dear Slab City” series, 2019.
© Zen Lefort / MYOP
The subtlety of the subject lies in the choice of photos, the sequencing and the fluid and harmonious hanging in the form of lines of free prints not framed or laminated, with serial associations and different formats and white margins varying according to the size of the photograph. Under the theme “Living in the camp” different precarious habitats linked to wars, migrations and precariousness or to a chosen way of life are brought together.
From this polyphony of images and subjects, there emanates a statement on the state of the world, of great calm, without harsh, grandiloquent or crude scenes, where the aside, the metaphor, the poetic are privileged. “We must be wary of this feeling of slight depression that the state of the world can bring about. Lucidity is important, but it must not lead to despondency, but on the contrary, to an uplift, an energy. Everything is modifiable, reconstructable »Michel Slomka wants to believe. For the captions of the photos and the names of their authors, please refer to the visit book distributed at the entrance to the Carré de Baudouin with free access. And to better discover each photographer, a black notebook – a summary of 20 prints from unpublished series(es), in progress or characteristic(s) of their work – was designed by the photographer Pierre Hybre, i.e. 20 notebooks scattered throughout the spaces, each arranged on a totem under which appears a summary of the work presented.
