This year, Cédric Gerbehaye spent December and January photographing in Sète, France, the sixth photographer to do so as part of an artist-in-residency program. As part of the residency, Gerbahaye’s photographs will be featured in the festival ImageSingulières, held in Sète from May 8th to 26th. The work will also be published in May by Le Bec en l’Air, in a book titled “Sète #13,” which will include an essay by Christian Caujolle, the founder and artistic director of Agence VU.Click here for a look.: http://nyr.kr/17tIvL6

(Source: newyorker.com)

There’s more breadth and depth—more of a sense of history at large, of the intrinsic and profound horror of the practice and the experience of torture, and of the moral issues involved in political action—in that thirteen-minute sequence than in the whole of “Zero Dark Thirty.” 

Richard Brody on the truthful torture scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Le Petit Soldat”: http://nyr.kr/ZuXX4Z

Alexis Okeowo on the kidnapping of a family in Cameroon, terrorism in West Africa, and what all of this means for France and the U.S.: http://nyr.kr/13gkQ1A

(Source: newyorker.com)

“I decided that 340 euros was too much to pay for a taxidermied bird…”

Henri Cole’s Paris diary, part V: http://nyr.kr/YpraMd

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Jessie Wender:

In the summer of 2010, Jonas Unger was commissioned by ZEITmagazin to photograph Gérard Depardieu at his château in the Loire Valley. I fell in love with these intimate, energetic photographs when I saw them, earlier this month. They’re an exciting way to see Depardieu—hair to the wind, flying on his scooter. Unger spoke to me about his experience photographing the French actor: http://nyr.kr/Yd27zN

(Source: newyorker.com)

For this week’s issue, Lauren Collins travels to France, where the actor Gérard Depardieu’s decision to become a Russian citizen and escape the Socialist party’s threatened tax increases is causing shock and turmoil: http://nyr.kr/12qc6pd

(Source: newyorker.com)

Lila Azam Zanganeh on all that will be lost with the destruction of Timbuktu’s ancient libraries: 

Since the fifteenth century, Timbuktu had been an epicenter of commerce on the trans-Saharan caravan route, but also, thanks to its thriving mosque and university, an oasis of learning and literacy. Founded between the eleventh and twelfth centuries by Tuareg tribes, the city soon housed scholars and scribes within its walls. These scribes copied countless works on topics ranging from political science, history, and theology to astronomy, botany, and poetry. Arabic and, at times, Fulani, Songhai, or Bambara texts were recopied on camel shoulder blades, sheepskins, tree bark, and even papers from Italy. Some were illumined with gold leaf, with frail calligraphy presenting significant stylistic variations. The surviving manuscripts, including one in Turkish and one in Hebrew, span the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Thus a written history of Africa was constructed, including the wondrous “Tarikh Al-Sudan,” a storied chronicle of West Africa.

…The disappearance of even a section of the city’s ancient libraries conversely represents no less than the death by fire of old and ancient men and women who had so far pursued, with us and between themselves, a quiet but immemorial dialogue…

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/VmTAID

Photograph by Horst Friedrichs/Anzenberger/Redux.

(Source: newyorker.com)

But even if no one is ever convicted of pulling the trigger that day in Paris, the murders are an important moment in Kurdish-Turkish relations, carrying the issue across oceans, and clarifying a few key components along the way.

Jenna Krajeski on the murder of three Kurdish women in women in Paris: http://nyr.kr/YqxucE

Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty

(Source: newyorker.com)

“Light” plays out almost entirely at the Monet residence, but the man of the house is often offscreen. For every passage describing his battle, waged on canvas, with the “luminous cloud of changing light” in which we all live, there are two passages showing us how the day looks and feels to the people around him: his wife, Alice; Alice’s children from a previous marriage; her grandchildren; Monet’s children from a previous marriage; their servants and visitors—for these people, Giverny was not a component of their lifework but, instead, a place where they happened to be employed, or to live some years of their lives. By moving between these perspectives, Figes attempts to bring Giverny to life—real life…

Peter C. Baker on the real world of Claude Monet portrayed in Eva Figes’s novel, “Light”: http://nyr.kr/Wwa3b1

Painting by Claude Monet/National Gallery of Art

Richard Brody on the opening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” in France: 

They’ll eat it up (as well they should). Along with the reviews that are coming in, the press is offering some terrific and illuminating interviews with Anderson…

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/ZnKKKd