From November 6th to 30th, 2025, Saint-Germain-des-Prés will be the place to be for photography enthusiasts with the 14th edition of the PhotoSaintGermain festival. Directed by Aurélia Marcadier, it offers visitors the chance to discover new exhibitions and twelve exclusive productions, with free admission, in museums, galleries, cultural centers, and bookstores on the Left Bank. On the program: the Étienne-Jules Marey collection at the Museum of the History of Medicine, Emilio Azevedo's “Rondônia” project at the Maison d'Auguste Comte, the 4th edition of ROOM SERVICE at the Hôtel La Louisiane, as well as Letizia Battaglia & Franco Zecchin at Berthet-Aittouarès, Florence Henri at the Galerie Le Minotaure, Candida Hofer at Laffanour Ia Galerie Downtown, and Robert Adams at Galerie Zander.

 

At Espace Art Absolument, the MEN exhibition offers a new perspective on masculinity, bringing together photographers from different generations: Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, Tomasz Machcinski, Louis Jammes, David Meskhi, Felipe Romero Beltran, and Pierre Élie de Pibrac. Their works, created from the 1980s to the present day, question the construction of identity and the relationship to culture, power, performance, and otherness. Better known for his autobiographical work, Robert Mapplethorpe, with his photographs of the dancer Ajitto (1991),  sublimates the male body through rigorous staging, akin to sculpture, where eroticism is combined with a desire for classicism: “Photography is a quick way to look, to create a sculpture,” he said. In his own way, Andres Serrano subverts virile iconography by plunging a cheap Hercules mold, Punishing Diomedes (1990), into a gaseous mixture of blood, urine, and other fluids. In a similar vein, he created Black Supper (1990), a monumental polyptych that reinvents Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper by photographing Jesus and his apostles immersed in a cloud of bubbles with spiritual effervescence.

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