Le Feu

A found-image artist book by the French photographer Pauline Hisbacq that treats desire and fantasy as material already circulating online, waiting to be re-cut into a new sequence.

Rather than shooting original photographs, Hisbacq assembled Le Feu from pictures collected from the internet, arranging them across forty pages by affinity, shock, and ricochet rather than narrative logic. The sequence moves through desire, fantasy, and eroticism with the loose momentum of a flirtation, treating the internet's flow of images as its own kind of imagination. Designed by François Santerre, the softcover edition of 100 copies is bound with an elastic band and was published by September Books in Paris in 2018.

Hisbacq trained in philosophy before studying photography at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles and, later, the International Center of Photography in New York. Le Feu followed her first book, Natalya (7 Editions, 2016), and preceded Amour adolescente (Rayon Vert, 2019) and further collaborations with September Books, forming part of a body of work that returns repeatedly to appropriated and found imagery as a way of examining desire.