Léa Habourdin and Thibault Brunet's 'Les Immobiles' at Le Bal, Paris

The Carte blanche PMU 2014 was awarded to a duo formed for the occasion, Léa Habourdin and Thibault Brunet, whose methods and styles differ radically. Habourdin produces sumptuous analog images with classical accents from her close surroundings, animals, and science, while Brunet creates synthetic portraits and landscapes from video games with often poor definition. Their project, 'Les Immobiles,' was produced in immersion with regulars of PMU bars in northern France. Rather than merging their methods, they kept their differences in tension, juxtaposing two opposing image regimes. The exhibition included 'photographic traps' reacting to players' movements, looped into brief dynamic animations, as well as diptychs and triptychs pairing Habourdin's close-up portraits (e.g., Patrick, a racing pigeon in its breeder's hands) with Brunet's interior views of the cafes taken with a console game camera. This camera, normally used for 3D body scanning, produced poor optics and shallow depth of field, reducing interiors to fraying fragments. The exhibition was brief, but the project also resulted in a book published by Filigranes, enriched with a short story by Agnès Desarthe. The Carte blanche PMU funds, exhibits, and publishes an original project offering an offbeat look at the world of games, and this year's award was considered a risk due to the duo's unconventional approach.