In Chambre 207, Jean-Michel André returns to a childhood rupture through photographs, investigative material, family archives and objects. On 5 August 1983 his father was killed with six other people in a hotel in Avignon while father and son were travelling on holiday. The book begins from that loss, but its form is not limited to recounting the crime. It is a visual essay in the vein of autofiction, concerned with what can be reconstructed when memories have disappeared.

The encounter between newly made photographs and surviving traces gives the work its particular tension. Evidence can establish an event, yet it cannot simply restore an experience. The book therefore connects investigation with an imaginative reconstruction of memory, asking how mourning and repair might take shape through images. Clément Chéroux’s accompanying account describes a movement between different times, bringing the past and the future of the tragic night into relation rather than following a straightforward chronology.

André’s wider photographic practice examines territories, their limits and their memories; absence and reparation recur across his projects. This book turns those concerns toward a personal history. Actes Sud published the 152-page hardcover in October 2024. Its 21 by 29.7 centimetre format recalls the A4 dimensions of investigative files, giving the relationship between inquiry and recollection a tangible expression. It received the 2024 Prix Nadar Gens d’images, selected from 117 submitted publications.

For collectors, Chambre 207 is worth attention as a book that places documentary traces and autobiographical imagination in the same field. The file-like dimensions and the mixture of family material with photographs are part of how its questions are presented, rather than incidental specifications. Its interest lies in the limits of what an archive can tell, and in the work images can do when a factual record alone cannot recover a lost relationship.