Transphère n° 05 takes its place in a numbered sequence: the Transphère cycle of exhibitions, organized around contemporary Japanese practice, with the fifth instalment given over to Tomoko Yoneda. Her commission was a specific one — to follow Albert Camus through the geography of his life — and the resulting series, made in 2017 and 2018, is published here for the first time as a whole.
Yoneda’s itinerary is concrete. She photographed in Algiers, in Tipaza, the Roman port the writer loved and where a stele now stands in his memory; in Paris; at Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the Auvergne village where Camus lived from 1942 and wrote The Plague; at Chambry, where his father fought as a zouave in the battle of the Marne; and at Saint-Brieuc, where in 1947 Camus found the grave of the father who died in 1914, a scene he returned to in the unfinished novel The First Man. The roughly thirty images, in colour and in black and white, hold those places in the present tense rather than illustrating a biography. Read alongside the writer’s texts, they set up a dialogue between photographer and novelist, and between past and present, while opening onto colonisation, war and the terms of Camus’s humanism.
What distinguishes the book within Yoneda’s own bibliography is its commission: the work was made for the Japan Foundation and the Maison de la culture du Japon à Paris, and the volume documents a body of pictures conceived as a single argument. Her larger practice — Eastern Europe, Northern Ireland, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Fukushima — photographs ordinary landscapes and interiors whose titles release the memory of events, and this Camus series applies that method to a literary life.
The book itself is modest in extent: 56 pages, paperback, published by Presses du Réel in 2018 as part of the Transphère series. For a collector, its interest lies less in scale than in function — an exhibition series kept intact, with texts by Marta Gili, Aomi Okabe and the photographer, and a complete sequence that has remained recognisable as one of Yoneda’s most tightly framed projects.
