Muriel Pic is a French-born writer and visual artist based in Switzerland whose practice bridges literature, experimental film, and photomontage. Although rarely labelled strictly as a photographer, her sustained engagement with archives and photographs places her at the junction of image-making and textual research. She completed a PhD at the EHESS in Paris and later received an Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches from the University of Fribourg, reflecting a dual academic and artistic career.

Her distinctive visual vocabulary emerges from collage and film editing. Instead of capturing new scenes, she retrieves orphaned snapshots, postcards, press shots, and official documents, then re-sequences them in artist’s books, slide installations, and short films. This practice resembles that of artists who “photograph photography,” yet her work is closer to a writerly approach to images—interpreting, annotating, and weaving archival imagery into lyrical narratives. Her tone is analytic and partly melancholic, as she questions how pictures register or erase Europe’s mid-century historical traumas.

Pic has produced several handmade limited-edition books and cross-genre publications, released by Les presses du réel, one of France’s leading art-book publishers. While no specific monograph was singled out by the photographic press, her multilayered volumes combine photograms, scans, and manipulated collages with critical essays and autofictional prose. A recurring subject is the reconstruction of personal and collective histories from fragmented evidence, using the page as an editing table. This collaboration highlights a meticulous approach to book design, where paper, layout, rhythm, and pacing are as meaningful as the images.

Since the early 2010s she has held research fellowships and artist residencies, including at the Institut d’Études Avancées in Nantes and the French Academy in Rome–Villa Medici. These residencies allowed her to develop cross-disciplinary projects linking the history of science to photographically-inspired imagination. Her work appears in festival and institutional settings that foreground expanded documentary practices, and she also works as a translator of German-language poetry, connecting her to German-speaking visual culture.

For collectors attuned to artists’ books and photographic thinking, Pic’s production merits attention for its inventive sequencing and the integration of archival images with dense poetic syntax. Her photographs seldom exist as standalone prints; instead, the books themselves function as sculptural objects whose turning pages orchestrate a delicate dialogue between text and picture. An accessible entry point is the catalogue of her publications with Les presses du réel, each volume designed to reward close reading and visual discovery.

〔PBL-BIO/2〕