Isabelle Le Minh

A graduate of École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie, Isabelle Le Minh explores the essence and limits of photography, and reactivates its history, techniques and theories. Her multi-faceted, polysemic body of work questions both the nature of the medium and the idea of originality in a world where the image rules.

In 2016 Le Minh was awarded the Révélation Livre d’Artiste prize by the Société des Auteurs dans les Arts Graphiques et Plastiques (ADAGP). Her work has been shown at Mois de la Photo in Montreal, the Goethe Institute and La Maison Rouge in Paris, Rencontres d’Arles, Paris Photo, Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France, the regional contemporary art museum in Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Mulhouse and MOCAK, Krakow’s museum of contemporary art.

Le Minh is represented by Galerie Christophe Gaillard, where she presented before something new in September 2019. Also that year she published her first monograph, after photography & beyond. From late 2019 until March 2020, Le Minh exhibited at the Hauts-de-France Centre Régional de la Photographie. Her interpretation of the archival work of German avant-garde photographer Alfred Ehrhardt (1901-1984) became After Aldred Ehrhardt – Cristal Réel, at the Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung Foundation in Berlin in 2020.

Le Minh’s project followed the American artist James Lee Byars during his time spent in Japan, first in Tokyo and Kurashiki in 1958, then in Kyoto from 1960 to 1967, in an attempt to understand his development as an artist and everything that nurtured his creative journey. This investigative undertaking served as a starting point for an artist’s book and an installation which associated photography with local materials and know-how. The project raised notions of presence and absence, and reflected on the nature of time and light: fundamental concepts in photography.

James Lee Byars, autobiographie, ephemera sur papier dissolvo, 1967