Simon Brodbeck & Lucie de Barbuat

Brodbeck & de Barbuat (Simon Brodbeck and Lucie de Barbuat) are a Franco-German artist duo based in Paris. This photographer couple works in perfect symbiosis from concept to final print. Since 2005, they’ve cultivated an artistic practice that delves into both the history of photography and the essence of their chosen experimental locales.

In their series Silent World, the duo captures the streets of Paris and Rome, two European metropolises with unrivaled cultural heritage. New York, with its iconic 20th-century architecture, and Hong Kong, with its futuristic ambiance, round out the series. In the November 2024 photo edition of Private Choice, the royal Place de la Concorde dialogues with Saint Sulpice church and the Roman Pantheon.

The homage to art history extends to their photographic technique. In 1838, Louis Daguerre’s first prints revealed empty landscapes, with only a shoe shiner man visible. The prolonged exposure time of early cameras erased all movement, yielding enigmatic and timeless images. Inspired by photography’s pioneer, Simon Brodbeck and Lucie de Barbuat recreate this stretched temporality by restricting light entering the lens. Using exposure times of 4 to 8 hours, followed by meticulous editing, the photographers reimagine a two-century-old technique through contemporary processes.

These deserted streetscapes, immortalized in 2009, uncannily foreshadow the surreal landscapes of the Covid era a decade later. In these nearly pictorial compositions, past, present, and future interweave. Human presence recedes, allowing monuments to emerge as the true protagonists.

As residents of the Villa Medici, French Academy in Rome from 2016 to 2017, they are graduates of the National School of Photography in Arles and the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris.