Portraits | Florence and Damien Bachelot collection at the Réattu museum

Portraiture is one of the guiding threads of this collection: "The essence of our collection is the human being. This was not a deliberate choice, but rather the result of observing our selections over time. In this spirit, it is only natural that portraiture should be one of the cornerstones of the collection—featuring images of individuals or groups, but also, more broadly, photographs that reflect human situations.", Damien Bachelot

As a faithful or distorted mirror of reality, portraiture reveals the wide range of perspectives photographers bring to their subjects. Through the body, facial features, or gaze, they seek to explore the intricate workings of the human mind. As a genre, portraiture challenges the traditional roles historically assigned to photography—identifying, recognizing, cataloguing, classifying—and sheds light, across time, on the sociological, political, religious, or cultural contexts of our societies.

This publication, with a foreword by Patrick de Carolis, Françoise Docquiert, and Andy Neyrotti, was co-published by Maison CF and the Réattu Museum in Arles, France.