Maxime Guedaly

Concentré sur la place de l’humain au sein de la société et de son interaction directe avec l’urbanisme, Maxime Guedaly constitue depuis dix ans une archive photographique documentaire. Photographe autodidacte issu d’une formation d’ingénieur, il construit ses projets à partir des archives constituées. Sélectionnées, ordonnées et mises en relation selon leur destination, ces images prennent place dans l’espace public et dans des espaces de diffusion ouverts à tous publics.

L’association formelle de plusieurs régimes d’images constitue un point de départ à une réflexion sur les mouvements physiques et politiques des communautés engagées dans la société, qu’elles soient issues d’un milieu culturel rattaché au spectacle vivant ou au monde associatif.

Par la vidéo, le photographe instaure un dialogue entre le mouvement de la respiration urbaine et humaine, créant un vocabulaire commun entre deux entités sorties de leur inertie.

Évoluant vers les champs de la performance et de l’art en commun, la place de l’artiste devient poreuse, entre la participation et la documentation. La question de la réception de l’œuvre ne s’en trouve pas changée mais celle du processus artistique est totalement revisitée.

Constance Heilmann-Herat

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Focusing on the role of humans within society and their direct interaction with their environment, Maxime Guedaly has been building a documentary photographic archive for the past ten years. A self-taught photographer with an engineering background, he constructs his projects from the archives he has created, selecting, organizing, and contextualizing images based on their intended purpose, ensuring they find a place in public spaces and venues accessible to diverse audiences.

The formal association of various image regimes serves as a starting point for reflection on the physical and political movements of communities engaged in society, whether stemming from cultural backgrounds linked to live performance or the associative realm. Through video, Maxime Guedaly establishes a dialogue between the rhythms of urban life and human respiration, creating a shared vocabulary between these two entities emerging from their inertia.

His video installation, “Corpflux”, was showcased at the Rencontres Photographiques d’Arles in 2019 and more recently during the latest edition of the DETER festival in September 2024. This annual event, initiated by choreographer and performer David Wampach, is dedicated to choreographic walks in the city center and natural surroundings of La Grand-Combe (southeast France), and has commissioned Maxime Guedaly to cover it since its inception in 2023.

In 2023, Classe Moyenne Editions published his book “Printemps Vivant 2019” (“Spring Alive 2019”), which results from various explorations during demonstrations, parties, and random strolls—always far from the suffocation of social media. The book has been featured at the Rolling Paper publishing festival at Le Bal in Paris and by Actes Sud during the Rencontres Photographiques d’Arles in 2024. An exhibition also took place in Toulouse at the Ombres Blanches bookstore.

In September 2024, choreographer and performer Pierre-Benjamin Nantel invited him to participate in and document his performing workshop as part of the Camping festival run by the Centre National de la Danse. This work was subsequently exhibited in December at the art center Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers.

As Maxime Guedaly evolves in the fields of performance and art in common, the role of the artist becomes increasingly porous, straddling the lines between participation and documentation. While the question of how the work is received remains constant, the artistic process is thoroughly reexamined.

Born in Toulouse in 1987, Maxime Guedaly is trained as an engineer and is a self-taught photographer. He further honed his skills in authorial projects at the École Nationale Supérieure de Photographie in Arles in 2018.