Matador

Matador borrows its title from the bullfighter's trick of concealing a blade inside a cape, using that image of hidden intent to frame a book about escape and the erasure of evidence.

Nicolas Hosteing sequences photographs of motorcycle and car riders burning rubber into full-bleed landscapes thick with fog or smoke, then closes with a series of helmet studies shot from shifting angles, so that concealment and disclosure keep trading places across the book. Études Books published it in Paris in 2012 as the third title in its Blue Books series, a clothbound hardcover with sewn binding and an attached stapled booklet carrying a text by Julien Perez, in a numbered edition of 300 copies.

Hosteing, born in 1985 and based in Paris, studied art history at Bordeaux and photography at the University of Paris 8. Matador belongs to a body of work built around fiction, staged evidence, and the unreliability of the photographic document, continuing the Blue Books series' interest in young French photographers working at the edge of narrative.