Avec le Coeur

Avec le Coeur collects Théo Gosselin's photographs of a 2012 road trip from Harlem to Venice Beach, taken when he was in his early twenties and still a student at Amiens' Arts Déco.

Gosselin funded and navigated the trip largely through social media. He posted images as he traveled and relied on followers for places to stay and eat along the way. The 96-page book gathers the color photographs that resulted: mostly informal portraits of the friends and strangers he met en route, with almost no accompanying text. Éditions du LIC first published it in 2013, in a numbered edition of 460 copies that sold out quickly, then reissued it in 2014 as a second edition of 1,000 copies with 75 color plates in a hot-foil-embossed hardcover.

Gosselin, born in Normandy in 1990, has named Ryan McGinley and Nan Goldin as reference points for this early work. His subjects, though, are his own friends rather than models or constructed scenes. Avec le Coeur established him as a photographer working in that lineage of loose, socially embedded portraiture. He has since published Sans Limites, also with Éditions du LIC, and Roll with Fisheye Éditions.