Books
Sur les traces de l'Afrique fantôme
Photos : Françoise Huguier
Text : Michel Cressole
Éditions Maeght, 1990 - 240 pages
From March 1931 to February 1933, Michel Leiris crosses Africa from West to East. He is the archivist of an ethnographic mission directed by Marcel Griaule, task that drives him to held a log. This travel notebook became "L’Afrique fantôme", a great book first published in 1934 by Gallimard. From May 1988 to January 1990, the photographer Françoise Huguier and the writer-reporter Michel Cressole, went back together on the Dajar-Djibouti mission's road, in quest of the "goût du merveilleux" (magic taste of life) that led Michel Leiris sixty years before in the Black country. Each of them held a travel log, one using images and the other, words.
En route pour Behring - notes de voyages en Sibérie
Photos : Françoise Huguier
Foreword : Gérard Lefort
Éditions Maeght, 1993 - 152 pages
This time, Françoise Huguier brings back « En route pour Behring – Notes de voyage en Sibérie. » from the other side of the earth, le Great North. What was this "adventuress" looking for? Was it, at firts, to be elsewhere? Things seen and perceived. Naked landscapes, snow and ice, inhabited landscapes near industrial workshops ou sea ports, little towns, villages, huts, tents, sleeepy gulags, gaveyards. Reindeers, , morses, whales, a white bear. Colours, smells. And faces, lives… Nenets, Tatars, Dolgans, Nganassans, Inuits, Bouriates, Russians, Armenieans, Lituanians… Françoise Huguier took six months to approach the mythic frontier beetween her childhood's geography and an adult dream. « En route pour Behring » is her log of this journey.
Secrètes
Photos : Françoise Huguier
Foreword : Claire Denis
Actes Sud, 1996 – 87 pages
« During her frequent travels through Burkina Faso and Mali, Françoise Huguier took the time of encounter : she spoke to people, went into houses, women's rooms, and listened.
This way, she earned the right to take pictures of their life, and brings back a serie of portraits seased in intimacy, simplicity and mutual respect. Stares capture your eye : familiar, intense stares, women's stares collected on doorsteps, or in the shelter of a room, the surrender of a bed corner.
The book then evokes the slow pace to confidences, in a text where Françoise Huguier tells by words the secrets that each of her photos respectfully betrays.
Sublimes
Photos : Françoise Huguier
Foreword : Gérard Lefort
Actes Sud, 1999 – 146 pages
Fashion photos shot in the shows during 15 years (1983-1998)
Azzedine Alaïa, Adeline André, Pierre Cardin, Jean Colonna, John Galliano, Jean-paul gaultier, Roméo Gigli, Olivier Guillemin, Rei Kawakubo, Michel Klein, Christian Lacroix, Karl Lagerfeld, Olivier Lapidus, Lecoanet-Hemant, Véronique Leroy, Martin Margiela, Issey Miyaké, Claude Montana, Thierry Mugler, Paco Rabanne, Gérard Pipard, Emmanuel Ungaro, Yves Saint laurent, Martine Sitbon, Gianni versace, Yohji Yamamoto.
J’avais huit ans
Photos : Françoise Huguier
Actes sud, 2005 -195 pages
I had to wait for 50 years before going back in Cambodia. Fifty years that hit hardly this country, through a history of conflicts and suffering.
This way back on the footsteps of my childhood matured for a long time in me. The reason of my slow pace was not fear, but the urge to live for my passion, photography. First, I had planned to go there with my friend Serge Daney but his life decided otherwise. So I flew for Africa, then Russia. Maybe I was unconsciously trying to occult my tragedy, though unforgotten.
Then I wanted to go back for the sake of my mother, whose memory at this time was fading as the years went by. This dive into the past was allowing me to really communicate with her, maybe for the last time.
In December 2003, quasi apneous, I went to the encounter of the child who, years agos, had tasted the the carefree life in the heart of plantation, and I got in touch with the 8 years girl I was, who had been a prisoner of the Viet Minh and the Issarak people.
To her, I dedicate this travel log that discharges my memory.