Long stored in a cabinet these 50’s-90’s archive images document the work of astrophysicists over many years at the Marseille Astrophysics Laboratory. Some of these shots were remarkable breakthroughs for the time. Mementos of both human and scientific adventures, they are the tangible traces of the historical capabilities of these research centers which designed and produced instruments to observe the universe. These black and white images have gradually lost their function and purpose. They may have been abandoned, but they have still escaped the dreadful outcome of so many unusable documents, they were gifted to the artist Caroline Corbasson who, alongside the photographer Andrea Montano, explored the poetry within.

The book and its images will be accompanied by a text by the french historian and curator Luce Lebart: 
“With or without legends, these images of stellar fields torn from their context of production and use resemble as much a photogram of dust clusters as a magnification of the photolytic structure of the silver grains constituting the image. The fascinating beauty of these photographs oscillates in vertigo between the immensely large and the immensely small, between the star and the task, between the dust and the star. And the boundaries are porous between a scientific image and an abstract image offered to aesthetic delight. These osmosis between scientific and artistic images recall the malleability of photographs. They have this immense facility to one day be in the field of science, another in the field of archive and then art to be considered again as documents and finally all at once.”

IMAGES : CAROLINE CORBASSON
AND ANDREA MONTANO
TEXT : LUCE LEBART
EDITORIAL DIRECTION & SEQUENCING : 
BUREAU KAYSER 
DESIGN: SYNDICAT
TRANSLATION : JEFFREY ZUCHERMAN
CAPTIONS : MICHEL MARCELIN
(CNRS RESEARCH DIRECTOR)