Edouard Levé

Édouard Levé (January 1, 1965–October 15, 2007, Paris) was a French writer, artist, and photographer.

Contents

Early career

Levé was self-taught as an artist and studied business at the elite École supérieure des sciences économiques et commerciales. He began painting in 1991.[1] Levé made abstract paintings but abandoned the field (claiming to have burned most of his paintings) and took up color photography[2] upon his return from an influential two-month trip to India in 1995.[1]

Books and photographs

Levé's first book, Oeuvres (2002), is an imaginary list of more than 500 books by the author, not actually written, although some of the items were taken up as the premisses of later books actually written and published by Levé (for example the photography books Amérique and Pornographie).[3][4]

Levé traveled in the United States in 2002, writing Autoportrait and taking the photographs for the series Amérique,[5] which pictures small American towns named after cities in other countries.[3][4] Autoportrait consists entirely of disconnected, unparagraphed sentences of the authorial speaker's assertions and self-description,[4][3] a "collection of fragments" by a "literary cubist."[1] Zadie Smith has admired the "adolescent aesthetic" of this work, its "mixture of thoughtfulness and self-regard, honest interrogation and mere posing."[4]

His final book, Suicide, although fictional, evokes the suicide of his childhood friend 20 years earlier, which he had also mentioned in "a shocking little addendum, tucked nonchalantly...into Autoportrait."[4] He delivered the manuscript to his editor ten days before he took his own life at 42 years old.[3]

Reception and influence

A chapter in Hervé Le Tellier’s novel Enough about Love pays homage to Edouard Levé, who appears as the character Hugues Léger, and to his book Autoportrait, the introspective and fragmentary style of which is imitated in an extract of a book titled Definition.

Gérard Gavarry’s book Expérience d'Edward Lee, Versailles (P.O.L., 2009) takes as its inspiration one hundred photos by Levé.

Works by Levé

Photography series
Other books

Notes

  1. ^ a b c Boris Daireaux, "Edouard aux mains d’argent(ique)," Evene.fr, November 2006
  2. ^ Jacques Morice, "L'écrivain et photographe Edouard Levé est mort," Télérama, October 22, 2007
  3. ^ a b c d Hugo Wilcken, "Happiness, Sadness, Death," The Berlin Review of Books, March 8, 2010
  4. ^ a b c d e Zadie Smith, "New Books," Harper's Magazine, May 2011, pp. 67-70.
  5. ^ "When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue," Paris Review, Spring 2011, No. 196
  6. ^ Magdalena Segertová, "La photo de presse et ses stéréotypes selon Edouard Levé," Czech Radio, November 28, 2003
  7. ^ Bernd Schwandt, "Group Photography as a Means of Communicating with Groups," in Fine and Schwandt (eds.), Applied communication in organizational and international contexts, Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 2008, pp. 31f.

External links