Les Enfantillages Pittoresques

Les Enfantillages Pittoresques is the fullest account of Laurent Millet's method, in which the photograph is the final justification for everything built, propped and abandoned before it, and it took the 2014 Prix Nadar for photography book of the year.

Published by Filigranes in May 2014 as a co-production with the Musées d'Angers, the 352-page hardcover carries some 200 colour and black-and-white photographs with texts by Michel Poivert, Arthur Kopel and Christine Besson, in French and English. It accompanied the retrospective at the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Angers, which brought more than 200 works together for the first time, and traces roughly seventeen years of Millet's serial projects: hybrid contraptions assembled from traditional, scientific and architectural objects, set in the studio or in the estuary landscape and then photographed. He calls them poetic machineries, and works, by his own account, from an erudition of clumsiness rather than from skill.

Millet (b. 1968) has worked in photography since the early 1990s and lives on the Gironde estuary, which supplies most of his settings. Filigranes had already published two of his books: the six-metre leporello La méthode (2002) and Petites machines à images.