PARIS PHOTO 2025
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PARIS PHOTO 2025
Brodbeck & de Barbuat, Yang Yongliang
November 11th—13th, 2025
GRAND PALAIS, PARIS, FRANCE
Booth 11
Brodbeck & de Barbuat (Simon Brodbeck and Lucie de Barbuat) are a Franco-German artist duo based in Paris. Since 2005, their projects have taken the form of ensembles that question the history of photography and the representation of reality in contemporary images. Inspired by beliefs linked to the mystery of the soul, their work captures Man’s silent melancholy in different ways, highlighting the gap between his existence and the world of dreams.
In Une histoire parallèle (since 2022), Brodbeck & de Barbuat this time use artificial intelligence (AI), the now-famous Midjourney, to generate a new history of photography from prompts : a sequence of keywords that AI translates into an image created from scratch, the most probable one according to what it has «learned» to associate with it- such a word equals such an image – from the immense database that is the Internet.
In other words, a statistical reflection of a reality calculated according to the memory that we have all put online. After detailed research (technique, context), Brodbeck & de Barbuat described to Midjourney some 200 works from the history of the medium (Man Ray, Stephen Shore, Guy Bourdin, Andres Serrano, Jeff Wall).
In many cases, they had to do a great deal of prompting, and sometimes many attempts, before AI came close to the original – enough, but not too much, to leave a few visible flaws. For some of the works, a « constellation » of attempts is exhibited, in counterpoint to others revisited in a single, small-format « AI version ». Indeed, Midjourney has not mastered everything or has very definite ideas.
For Peintre de la tour Eiffel, Paris (1953), in trying to do what it thought was expected, AI clearly wanted another Eiffel Tower to appear in the background, in addition to the one we could only guess at in Marc Riboud’s photograph. In Étude d’après Horst P. Horst, Hands, Hands, Hands, 1941, we can only conclude that the representation of hands is not yet AI’s specialty. Nor are leaves (Taryn Simon). As for Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936), she has had some cosmetic facial work done by Midjourney’s advertising bias.
For while this project criticizes a new technology that undermines our perception, between the looting of works of art, the dilution of a visual heritage and aesthetic impoverishment, it is above all concerned with memory : our own, that of AI, that of photography.
— Aurélie Cavanna
But with each image there’s a suggestion of confusion between what we recognize, like Martin Parr’s artificial beach, and what is wrong with it. And with our struggling memories, we can’t always determine exactly what it is.
Fellows of the Villa Medici, French Academy in Rome from 2016 to 2017, Brodbeck & de Barbuat are graduates of the École nationale supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, and the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris. Winners of the national photographic commission « Image 3.0 » in partnership with the Jeu de Paume and the Cnap national collections in 2021, they were awarded the Prix Jeune création 2013, the HSBC Award for Photography in 2010 and the Nestlé prize at the Festival Images Vevey 2010.
Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Fotomuseum in Antwerp, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the Villa Médicis in Rome and the Institut français du Japon, and group exhibitions including the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, the Arsenale in Venice, the Cairo Biennale, the Saatchi gallery in London, the Museum of Photography in Thessaloniki and the Mucem in Marseille, among others.
Yang Yongliang is known for his contemporary reinterpretation of shanshui—traditional Chinese landscape painting—which he reimagines using digital tools.
From a distance, his works resemble misty mountains, serene forests, or winding rivers. Yet upon closer inspection, these landscapes are revealed to be composed of urban elements: skyscrapers, power lines, construction sites, and traffic jams. This shift from one world to another reflects a deep concern about rapid urbanization, the erosion of tradition, and the dramatic transformation of the environment. Without being didactic, his work offers a subtle critique of the environmental, economic, and social upheavals of our time, while also suggesting the possibility of a dialogue between cultural heritage and technological modernity.
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Yang Yongliang, Sleepless Wonderland, 2012, Lightbox, 150 x 300 cm, details
Yang Yongliang (born in Shanghai in 1980) is an artist currently based in New York. Raised in the Old Town of Jiading during the 1980s, he studied traditional Chinese painting from an early age. In the early 2000s, he graduated from China Academy of Art and began experimenting in multidisciplinary art. Yang’s digital Chinese landscapes have redefined traditional landscape paintings, featuring a massive amount of urban images reconstructed and recomposed. Poetic and quaint as it appears to be when seen from a distance, it unfolds a fable of modern civilization upon closer inspection.
His works have been exhibited internationally and collected by public institutions worldwide, including Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the British Museum in London, Paris Museum of Modern Art and National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.