The Bibliothèque nationale de France by Franck Bohbot

The Bibliothèque nationale de France, Oval reading room, Paris, 2014. 30” x 40”, Edition of 5 C-Type Print

"Composition rules here in this image of France's palatial national library. The viewer can sense the all engulfing silence within this cathedral of learning..."

About The Artist

Franck Bohbot is an artist specializing in photography and film. Born in the southernmost suburbs of Paris, France, Franck Bohbot moved to New York City in 2013 and is currently based in Los Angeles since 2019. He is a documentarian with an eye for the theatrical who found his way to photography by way of cinema, and although he turned his focus fully to photography in 2008, the formal and aesthetic influences of the cinematographic form continue to underlie his present work. Bohbot’s work inhabits a space between reality and fantasy, documenting and storytelling, every frame – to borrow a phrase from Nan Goldin – like a still from a nonexistent film. He has drawn artistic inspiration from figures as diverse as Jeff Wall, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Edward Hopper, Luigi Ghirri, and Martin Scorsese. Bohbot frequently takes a formal, typological approach to craft visual narratives, highlighting the surreal symmetries of our constructed worlds and capturing the poetry of everyday places with a unique attentiveness to the interplay of light and color. He employs the latter two elements as tools of nostalgia, exploring loss and obsolescence by crafting images that are as much about what is invisible or lacking as what is there within the frame. Rendering public spaces, street scenes, and architectural sites of interest in his distinctive muted palette, he documents inanimate structures with all the sensitivity of a human portrait, as though constructing an imaginary archive of social spaces for a post-apocalyptic time capsule. His work has received widespread critical acclaim and has appeared in a range of national publications including  TIME, National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Wired, New York Magazine, The Financial Times, The Independent, Les Inrockuptibles, Marie Claire,  Elle, or Corriere Della Sera, Vogue