David Luraschi made Ensemble on the salt flats of the Camargue, the marshy river delta west of Marseille where France’s Rhône meets the sea. The landscape there is flat, windswept and desolate, and Luraschi treats it less as a backdrop than as a slow-acting solvent. Across a sequence of choreographed nudes, bodies mingle, interlock and are gradually absorbed into their surroundings. The figures are turned away from the camera, folded into oblique embraces, so that they read at once as charged, tender, uncomfortable, intimate and anonymous — physical presences that resist individual identification.
The book grew out of friendship and collaboration rather than assignment in the ordinary sense: the designer Simon Porte Jacquemus commissioned the work, and the dancers Claire Tran and Paul Girard perform within it. Luraschi, a French-American photographer based in Paris, has built a practice around such exchanges, and Ensemble distills that method into a small, concentrated object. The 32-page booklet — sixteen tritone plates at 270 × 320 mm, three-hole-stitched and debossed, published by Loose Joints in July 2021 — holds the photographs in a construction plain enough to let the sequencing carry the argument.
For collectors, the book’s interest lies in how tightly its circumstances are bound together: a specific place, a commissioned collaboration, a defined group of performers and a publisher’s own moment. Loose Joints released Ensemble in a limited run alongside the opening of its Marseille bookshop, also named Ensemble, with copies available principally in person there; a special edition with a silver gelatin print was also issued. That context is documentary, not speculative. What remains on the page is an unusually disciplined study of how the body surrenders its edges to a place.
Ensemble is a book about dissolving — of figure into ground, of individual into group — and it asks to be read as a sequence rather than a portfolio. Its scale is modest; its ambitions are not. The photographs reward sustained, slow attention, which is precisely what the format allows.
