Jean-Luc Moulène, Disjonctions

At the end of the 80s, photography suddenly appeared on the contemporary art scene. Both in Germany (Thomas Struth, Andréas Gursky, etc.) and in North America (Lewis Baltz, Jeff Wall), it explores new aspects of our relationship to reality. At the same period, France asserts its own identity thanks to a few unique writings (Jean-Marc Bustamante or Patrick Tosani). This era is particularly marked by Jean-Luc Moulène.

It was his series of photographs named “Disjonctions” that had the now world-wide known artist noticed. These 42 pictures were created between 1985 and 1995 and have considerably and sustainably influenced photography, so much that with years, the series has become seminal and contaminates a number of different practices.

As a polymorphic artist and a key figure of the art scene, Jean-Luc Moulène considers photography as a study object of natural and cultural phenomena, as they were defined by our contemporary and post-industrial society.

Jean-Luc Moulène’s series “Disjonctions” was shown for the first time in its whole at the contemporary art center Transpalette (Bourges) in 2014, then in Rome at the Villa Médicis in 2015.

Through his series, Jean-Luc Moulène deconstructs the codes of photography (still lives, street photographs, portraits, architecture…) and uses street photography in order to capture its variety and soul and take us back to our conditions of existence. Because of their ambiguous character, these pictures do not rely on any standard or stable codes of interpretation.

They resist to a passive “consumption” and call for a certain sharpness of sight.

This book was published with the support of the CNAP (Centre national des arts plastiques)