Published by 5 Continents Editions in January 2004, Philippe Chancel’s Regards d’artistes assembles portraits of around one hundred contemporary artists. The project includes figures such as Jeff Koons, Frank Stella, James Turrell, Pierre Soulages, Christian Boltanski, and Pierre et Gilles, placing a broad cross-section of contemporary artistic practice within a single photographic volume.

Its subject is not an artistic movement or a narrowly defined generation, but the artists themselves: their presence, individuality, and public identities as encountered by the camera. That premise gives the book a useful double focus. It records recognizable figures in contemporary art while also presenting photography as an interpretive act, shaped by the photographer’s attention to each sitter rather than by a neutral catalogue of names.

The scale of the undertaking is central to the book’s character. Around one hundred portraits create a collective portrait of an art world, allowing differences in personality, medium, and reputation to emerge through comparison. The range—from Koons and Stella to Turrell, Soulages, Boltanski, and Pierre et Gilles—makes the volume especially relevant to readers interested in how contemporary artists have been represented across distinct practices and generations. Laurence Bertrand Dorléac contributes the foreword, establishing a dialogue between Chancel’s photographic work and critical reflection.

For collectors, Regards d’artistes deserves attention as a substantial, focused record of contemporary artists at the beginning of the 2000s. The French-language hardcover contains 224 pages in a 23 × 26 cm format, dimensions that support sustained viewing while keeping the book firmly within the tradition of the photographic monograph. Its value lies less in a single celebrated portrait than in the cumulative intelligence of the ensemble: a carefully defined subject, an extensive roster of sitters, and the collaboration between photographic portraiture and art-historical writing.