Over the past few years, Nuits Balnéaires has established a practice that is hybrid in many ways. The Ivorian artist moves between fine art, fashion, and research-based practices; his influences are a blend of cinema, literature, theater, performance, and cultural history; his life is both rooted in the small coastal town of Grand-Bassam, east of Abidjan, and involved with many more international cultural communities.

Eboro was created as part of the Latitudes program of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, of which Nuits Balnéaires is the second laureate. This project introduces a more autobiographical dimension to Nuits Balnéaires’ work. The project begins in Dakar, Senegal, where, on July 22, 1986, his uncle, Noël X. Ebony, a distinguished journalist and playwright, died in unresolved circumstances. “There is an inexplicable connection between us, perhaps stemming from transgenerational memory”, Nuits Balnéaires has said. In the Agni-Bona tradition of Côte d’Ivoire, which has profoundly shaped the artist, the nephew plays a key role in accompanying the uncle during his transition into the afterlife. For the artist, this took the form of an exploration of how prior trajectories, whether distant or familial, may influence or even predetermine our own life paths.

Nuits Balnéaires created Eboro by intuition, allowing the affective power of place and familial memory to shape the interconnected visual chapters of this multilayered work. He welcomes the melancholy and trauma of his uncle’s story with gentleness and hope, probing how imagination can contribute to healing transgenerational wounds.

Curator of the exhibition

David Campany,

Creative Director, International Center of Photography

(ICP), New York

Ivorian photographer Nuits Balnéaires is the second recipient of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès’ Latitudes program.

For Daido Moriyama, photography is alive, very much alive. Since the early 1960s, he has maintained a daily, almost existential relationship with it. He addresses photography through images, books and writing, each time a declaration. In 1972, his book Shashin yo sayonara [Farewell Photography ] broke from the rules of “good” photography. At the same time, he published essays in Japanese photography magazines (Asahi Camera , Provoke , Shashin Jidai, etc.), each a kind of manifesto. He would also make repeated pilgrimages to sites associated with the very first photographer, Nicéphore Niépce. Many of his everyday images turn the medium back on itself—they hold up a mirror to it.

The exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson is not a traditional retrospective organized around a chronological sequence of masterpieces. It is structured around a single, decisive premise: Moriyama’s obsession with photography itself.

Curator of the exhibition

Clément Chéroux

Director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson