Greek version

La Disparition by photographer Nathalie Bauer is a visual and conceptual exploration of French identity and collective memory, intertwining two seemingly opposed events of 2018: Paris Fashion Week and the Gilets Jaunes protests. Through mirrored series of photographs and texts, the book examines these events as a form and a counter-form of the same phenomenon, the collective enactment of the cycle of time.
This hybrid publication weaves together recurring motifs -fashion shows, dense crowds, symbols of power in public space, the Vendôme column, luxury boutiques- to probe the origins of anger and revolution. Drawing from 19th-century insurrection literature and its central idea of the Eternal Return of the Same, it interrogates how power is performed, resisted, and made visible, or invisible.
It is a hybrid object where a book is sewn hidden within a book, the pages of text hiding and revealing images that echo the notion of high-visibility jackets worn by people who feel invisible, addressing a social critique of the power of the fashion industry that privatises public spaces and colonises our collective imagination.
The nodal point between the two series of images and two intertwined stories, both giving a voice to women during those two events, is Vendôme: at once the iconic Parisian square and a small provincial town. This nodal point collapses geography and symbolism.
The making of the book -no glue, just paper cut, folded and sewn- akin to the making of clothes. The sewn binding evokes the invisible labor of garment-making, often done by women. The manual collation of text disrupts the image sequence, introducing an irregular rhythm that resists passive viewing.
All pages are printed on the same paper; there is no designated “cover,” reflecting a refusal to impose hierarchies on images in the public sphere. The book exists in two versions: a bound edition and an unbound one. In the unbound version, text and images can be freely rearranged by the reader.

On the occasion of the project/book, photologio and editor Athina Alkini approached the photographer and spoke with her…

Nathalie Bauer

Do vacated public spaces tell us more about presence or absence?
The two mirrored series of pictures in La Disparition play on the theme of duality. One series shows empty interiors after fashion shows have taken place, images that come after the ones we are usually shown. What remains are traces of the events: piles of plastic chairs, empty clothes hangers, elements that reveal how these spaces were temporarily requisitioned for fashion shows. This visual absence speaks more about displacement than anything else. The symbolic capital is palpable: famous brands stage shows in iconic buildings, attended by famous VIPs. The countless images produced from these events accumulate, amplifying the visibility and cultural power of already dominant entities.

Nathalie Bauer

In La Disparition, the city appears right after something has happened, emptied, paused and suspended. What draws you to the aftermath rather than the event itself?
Some of the pictures in La Disparition were taken during the Gilets Jaunes protests, when I was right in the middle of the crowd. For me, photography has always been more of an excuse to go and see, rather than to show or testify. I worked for a long time as a news photographer, though I was never fully convinced that photography – at least on its own – is an effective medium for informing. So, during the Gilets Jaunes protests, my aim was to break away from the conventions of news photography, where the same visual motifs are endlessly repeated, regardless of the event: masked figures throwing stones at the police for instance, or anecdotal moments like the deterioration of public space, pictures that have circulated widely at the time, overshadowing, in my view, the legitimate revendications and anger that were being expressed through that movement.
Instead, I tried to distance myself from that narrative. I photographed the crowd using a flash, underexposing the background so that only small lights emerge in an almost dark environment. The result is more about atmosphere than action, more ambiguity than clarity.
For the images of empty spaces taken after fashion shows, I deliberately chose to shoot at a moment when photography is not expected, after the spectacle, in contrast to the highly documented shows themselves. To me, these images are the true backstage. They reveal something of the hidden labor and power structures at play, elements that every photojournalist should strive to uncover.

Nathalie Bauer

What questions do you hope to raise about who becomes visible in urban space, and who remains invisible?
The whole point of the book, for me, is to push back – using my own means – against the dominant narratives surrounding two highly mediated events: Paris Fashion Week and the Gilets Jaunes protests. The Gilets Jaunes movement was rooted in a desire to become visible in public space, yet it was quickly labeled as violent, blindly destructive, a kind of modern-day jacquerie. Meanwhile, Fashion Week in Paris is presented as a kind of joyous, artistic festival, endlessly photographed and praised in the media. It generates overwhelmingly positive coverage, often described as avant-garde or even “historic.”
What I tried to show is that the Gilets Jaunes crowd was, in fact, visually striking – beautiful even – with the bright yellow vests moving through the Parisian landscape. These were scenes rarely framed in this way. These protests didn’t follow the usual “authorised” routes that characterise French demonstrations – which, as you know, are almost a national tradition! There’s always one happening, and they usually follow the same approved paths, pre-validated by police.
But the Gilets Jaunes disrupted all of that. It broke the rules, genuinely and spontaneously, from the ground up. Not as a performance orchestrated by one of the most powerful industries in the world, like fashion. My intention was to restore a sense of dignity, credibility, and even beauty to a movement that was largely demonized in the press. In contrast, Fashion Week appears as a tightly controlled ritual: the same events, in the same iconic locations, on the same predictable calendar.

Nathalie Bauer

In many images, the buildings seem to absorb the tension of what’s happened, whether that is protests, glamour of the fashion world, police presence or human absence. Do you think the built environment holds memory?
That’s a beautiful question. In fact, the idea to bring these two series together in a single book, though they weren’t originally created with that intent, came from the fact that both the Gilets Jaunes protests and the fashion weeks took place in the same locations. Specifically, they happened in what’s known as Le Triangle d’Or in Paris – the Golden Triangle – a space filled with layered symbolism: historical monuments, luxury boutiques, government buildings, the Élysée Palace where the president resides. I find it quite strange, and telling, that symbols of democracy and political power on one hand and economic and symbolic power on the other are concentrated in that single area. It says a lot about French identity.
The core idea of the book revolves around the dual meaning of “Vendôme” as both the Place Vendôme in Paris, at the heart of the Golden Triangle, and Vendôme the small provincial town, relatively unknown, where a major fashion brand purchased the main historical building to install its atelier, precisely during the time of the Gilets Jaunes protests. That coincidence was too striking not to become part of the narrative. It gave me the idea for the accompanying text, a way to connect these two events more explicitly.
At the end of the book, everything converges at Place Vendôme, a space that houses not only luxury boutiques but also the Ministry of Justice where the Gilets Jaunes congregated during the first protests. The column at its centre, originally erected by Napoleon, destroyed and rebuilt after the Commune, has become, for me, a symbol of the inevitable failure of revolution. Fashion weeks and protests function almost like collective rituals. Through them, we re-activate monuments – we perform, resist, or reinforce power. We destroy and rebuild. We give meaning to these spaces over and over again. I was inspired by the 19th-century literature of insurrection – particularly the writings of Louis-Auguste Blanqui who, in Eternity by the Stars, arrives at the conclusion that revolutions must always happen, even if they are destined to fail, even if there are ultimately in vain.
What remains is the place, time doesn’t exist, or at least not linear time as we conceive it, it’s cyclical, the Eternal Return of the Same. It is very tragic. As Mallarmé famously put it in a line that has always stayed with me – enigmatic, yet somehow summing it all up: “NOTHING WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE /BUT THE PLACE /EXCEPT PERHAPS A CONSTELLATION.”
Constellation was actually my working title for a long time.

Nathalie Bauer

What visual language allows you to hold both beauty and critique in the same frame?
The use of a soft and muted palette, or even shadowy tones create an unsettling atmosphere and a deliberate ambiguity, whilst visual repetition of motifs -plastic chairs, metal clothes hangers, architectural details- echo the idea of ritual and structure, the pictures document space more than the event, a shift from traditional photojournalism. La Disparition speaks in a quiet haunting visual language, echoing more than stating, suggesting more than documenting.

Nathalie Bauer

There’s something almost investigative in your work, as if the viewer has arrived too late, but still must piece together a story. Are you interested in the tension between documentation and interpretation?
Absolutely. I think that’s at the core of my photographic practice: to respond to existing images that already shape our collective imagination. La Disparition was published six years after the events it references, and while sequencing the images, I played intentionally with what the viewer has already seen or what they already know. I leave space for the viewer to fill in the gaps. I tried to avoid, as much as possible, images that they might have already encountered elsewhere. I know that can be disorienting: you don’t actually see fashion shows in the book, even though I say it’s about them. You don’t see Place Vendôme either, though it plays a central role. I’m not trying to seduce the viewer with images they will want to binge on. That’s probably not a very good selling point!

Nathalie Bauer

The notion of local displacement and unrest is central to La Disparition, yet your images don’t show direct eviction or protest, they suggest its echo. Do you see this indirectness as a more effective form of resistance and reflection?
I suppose what I really want is for the book to create a moment of reflection on events that have dominated the news cycle for a times but have now disappeared from public discourse. That’s also why the text in La Disparition is essential. I don’t believe images alone can fully engage with complex issues or convey layered meaning on their own. The presence of text makes the book, by definition, something that takes longer to “read” than a typical photobook, hopefully inviting the viewer to move back and forth between the text and images, piecing together the clues I have left throughout. Even the colophon has its importance and contains elements that help decode the way the images are intertwined. Indirectness, in that sense, is about creating space for interpretation.

Nathalie Bauer

While photography often tries to freeze the present moment, La Disparition seems to extend time, stretching the moment just after an action. What role does suspended time play in your photographic approach?
I’m really glad you asked this question, time is absolutely central to La Disparition, on many levels. First, the book critiques the temporality of news coverage. As I have mentioned, La Disparition was published six years after the events it refers to. It occupies a strange time zone: not current news, but not history either. It’s a way to return to moments that haven’t been fully processed, that still linger unresolved.
As a photographer, I’ve always been fascinated by the way photography encapsulates time- especially through long or very long exposures. Much of photography’s history has been shaped by a race toward instantaneity, and the “decisive moment.” News photography, in particular, is still all about that. But there was another strand at the beginning that look towards experimenting the capacity of photograph to hold a stretch of time, very different from what the eye does. The longer the exposure, the more it reveals. And the truth is, we never really know what time a photograph holds. We think we do, but it’s always mediated – by a caption, a title, camera metadata, or simply the context in which we encounter the image, a magazine, a book, a gallery… If you’re a documentary photographer, this ambiguity can be a problem. It is the difference between life and death! For example, take a picture of someone with their eyes closed – are they blinking? Are they sleeping? Or is it an image of someone no longer alive? Without the text or context, we can’t say.

Nathalie Bauer

In La Disparition, many of the images were made with a film camera, which gives them a kind of atemporal texture. You can’t quite tell when they were taken – was it yesterday, or decades ago? I also used long exposures, which contributes to the emptiness of the scenes. Is there no one there because they have left or because the exposure erased them?
The text also explores temporality and palliates what photography can’t tell. The first section, set during a fashion show, is written entirely in the present tense. That tense introduces a kind of brutality, a sense of being trapped in a perpetual “now”, which mirrors both the character’s experience and the fashion industry itself. The second part, centered on a woman attending the first “act” of the Gilets Jaunes, is written in the pluperfect – the past of the past – except for one paragraph in the present tense. That single moment is the only point where text and image clearly align. The pluperfect, for me, is the tense of event photography. In the case of the Gilets Jaunes, it adds a layer of nostalgia and melancholy, reinforcing the feeling that revolutions are destined to fail.

Nathalie Bauer

After exploring disappearance, tension, and trace in La Disparition, what remains unresolved for you? Are there new directions or questions you find yourself gravitating toward, visually or conceptually?
I don’t think I have resolved any questions through this project! If I’m being honest, La Disparition was a way to fight my own disappearance. It was about pushing ideas out into the world, putting forward a proposal—even if it wasn’t completely finished or thought through. I did not wait for validation. After years of caring for my young children, and a total disappearance from the public scene, it felt vital to make this book happen. It was a way to reappear, in my own terms.
I’m now working on a new project about the historical landscape in eastern France, where I grew up. It is a region marked by war, deindustrialization, and social struggles, a place that has long carried the weight of stigma, associated with abandonment, grimness, and predetermined social fate.
I find myself drawn less to individuals than to the built environment – whether shaped by architecture or collective memory. It’s within these constructed spaces that I sense something human, even if no one is present. They carry traces of history, ideology, and lived experience, and I’m interested in how these spaces can reflect the invisible forces that shape lives: class, power, neglect, resistance.

Nathalie Bauer

Bio
Nathalie Bauer, originally from Nancy, in eastern France, where she graduated from the Art Academy, started her career as a photographer in London covering film premieres, fashion weeks, festivals and everything on the entertainment agenda for the international press. She has also worked as a syndication manager, picture editor, and account executive for photo agencies in France and in the UK.
In 2016, Nathalie Bauer became an official photographer for the then-president François Hollande, and moved back to France amid the Brexit campaign. She remained in that position until after Emmanuel Macron’s election for another 6 months. She now works in Paris on commissions for commercial clients and institutions whilst also developing personal projects that draw on her experience in the press industry and news coverage and that question the sense of place, media rituals and collective performances. In 2022 Bauer launched *esotopies, a small independent publishing.

Nathalie Bauer

Nathalie Bauer

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