Rivages

Lara Gasparotto's first monograph, gathering years of unposed photographs of her friends as they grew up together in Belgium.

Gasparotto began photographing her circle of friends as a teenager and kept at it into her twenties, building a body of pictures shot on the fly rather than staged: swimming holes, bedrooms, cigarettes, bruises, skin, and the ordinary drift of adolescence into early adulthood. Rivages (French for "shores") sequences these images without captions or chronology, favoring chance and intimacy over a polished or curated narrative arc. Lannoo published the 140-page hardcover in 2014, designed in close collaboration with the photographer, bilingual in Dutch and English.

Gasparotto (b. 1989) studied photography at the School of Photography of Saint-Luc in Liège and has since exhibited in Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, Arles, and Beijing, and is represented by Stieglitz19 gallery in Antwerp. Rivages established the loose, diaristic documentary style — young bodies, found intimacy, muted color and grain — that has carried through her later editorial and gallery work.