Figures

In Figures the French artist Gilles Pourtier (b. 1980) goes looking for the people in Bernd and Hilla Becher's photographs of industrial architecture, and redraws the few he finds.

His source is the twelve typological books the Bechers published between 1977 and 2013. Their pictures of winding towers, gas tanks and framework houses are known for being unpeopled. Now and then a worker or a passer-by stands at the edge of a frame, small enough to miss. Pourtier isolates these figures, enlarges them and redraws them. A posture, a wait or a gesture becomes the subject, and the structure around it drops away. The cover enlarges a printed detail until it breaks into halftone dots. Spassky Fischer designed the book, a 40-page softcover at 24 by 32 centimetres. Poursuite Éditions published it in September 2026 with support from the Centre national du livre, for the bicentenary of photography, and from the Région Sud.

Pourtier was born in the Drôme, trained in glassmaking at CERFAV in Nancy, and graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles in 2009. He has been based in Provence since then and works across photography, sculpture and drawing. The Bechers recur in his work. FW, shown at URDLA in Villeurbanne in 2020, recut their framework houses as woodblock prints. The pencil series Labor Sculpture, begun in 2022, draws the human presences in their photographs. Figures is his sixth book with Poursuite Éditions, after Before Science (2014), SK/KS (2016), Barn Raising (2017), La grande surface de réparation (2019) and Si mes larmes coulaient dans tes yeux (2021).