Le Bal is an independent arts centre in Paris. It focuses on documentary photography, video, cinema and new media through exhibitions, production, book publishing, talks and debates. Le Bal has around 350 m² of exhibition space divided across two floors; a bookshop, Le Bal Books; and café, Le Bal Café. It is located off Place de Clichy at 6 Impasse de la Défense,

18th arrondissement The 18th arrondissement of Paris (''XVIIIe arrondissement'') is one of the 20 Arrondissements of Paris, arrondissements of Paris, the capital city of France. In spoken French, this arrondissement is referred to as ''dix-huitième''. The arrondis ...

, 75018, Paris. It opened in September 2010. Its director is Diane Dufour (who was European Director of Magnum Photos from 2000 to 2006).

Details

The building is a former 1930s dance hall called Chez Isis. Le Bal co-publishes two or three books each year, including L’Anti-collection, a limited-edition artist’s book which it jointly publishes with the

Centre national des arts plastiques The Centre national des arts plastiques (National Centre for Visual Arts, Cnap) is a French institution established in 1982 under the Ministry of Culture and Communication that promotes creation of visual arts. It provides assistance to artists and ...

, and ''Les Carnets du Bal''. Le Bal’s educational platform, La Fabrique du Regard, has run programmes since 2008 for young people aged 8–18, especially from disadvantaged areas of Paris and its suburbs, to critically look at images.Interview between Diane Dufour and Mark Feustel. FOAM Magazine. Issue #25, Winter 2010. . http://issuu.com/foam-magazine/docs/25_traces http://www.marcfeustel.com/foam-25/ Le Bal Books is run by Sébastian Hau. Le Bal Café is operated by Alice Quillet, Anna Trattles and Anselme Blayney. It serves a French take on traditional British cuisine. Since 2010 Le Bal has been involved with the annual Prix des Ecoles d’Art SFR Jeunes Talents / Le Bal (The SFR / Le Bal award for young photography with ADAGP).ADAGP is Société des Auteurs dans les Arts Graphiques et Plastiques;

SFR SFR (; ''Société française du radiotéléphone'', ) is a French telecommunications company. As of December 2015, it had 21.9 million customers in Metropolitan France for mobile services, and provided 6.35 million households with high-spee ...

is Société française du radiotéléphone It is a competition open to art school students and former students who graduated less than three years before entering. It carries a 5000 Euro prize intended to support the winner for two years in making or completing a documentary photography project.

Antoine D'Agata Antoine d'Agata (; born 1961) is a French photographer and film director. His work deals with topics that are often considered taboo, such as addiction, sex, personal obsessions, darkness, and prostitution. D'Agata is a full member of Magnum Photo ...

's ''Anticorps'' (2013), a catalogue published by Le Bal and Éditions Xavier Barral for his retrospective at Le Bal, won the

Rencontres d'Arles The Rencontres d’Arles (formerly called ''Rencontres internationales de la photographie d’Arles'') is an annual summer photography festival founded in 1970 by the Arles photographer Lucien Clergue, the writer Michel Tournier and the historia ...

Author’s Book Award in 2013. In 2015, the book ''Images of Conviction: The Construction of Visual Evidence'' (Xavier Barral and Le Bal, 2015) won the Photography Catalogue of the Year award in the

Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards The Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards is a yearly photography book award that is given jointly by Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation. It is announced at the Paris Photo fair and was established in 2012. The categories are First P ...

Exhibitions

*''Anonymes: L’Amérique sans nom: Photographie et Cinéma'' (Anonymous: Unnamed America in Photography and Film), September–December 2010. A thematic exhibition with works by

Jeff Wall Jeffrey Wall, Order of Canada, OC, Royal Society of Canada, RSA (born September 29, 1946) is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he helped define the Van ...

, Walker Evans, Chauncey Hare,

Lewis Baltz Lewis "Duke" Baltz (September 12, 1945 – November 22, 2014) was an American visual artist, photographer, and educator. He was an important figure in the New Topographics movement of the late 1970s.

, Standish Lawder,

Sharon Lockhart Sharon Lockhart (born 1964) is an American artist whose work considers social subjects primarily through motion film and still photography, often engaging with communities to create work as part of long-term projects. She received her BFA from th ...

Doug Rickard Doug Rickard (26 May 1939 – 7 May 2002) was an Australian-born space engineer. He is known for his stories of engineering while at the Woomera Deep Space Station. He died in 2002 from myelofibrosis caused by contact with cobalt-60 while w ...

, Anthony Hernandez, Arianna Arcara & Luca Santese, and Bruce Gilden. Curated by Diane Dufour and

David Campany David Campany (born 8 October 1967) is a British writer, curator, artist and educator, working mainly with photography. He has written and edited books; contributed essays and reviews to other books, journals, magazines and websites; curated pho ...

. Held in association with Mois de la Photo, Paris. *''Foto/Gráfica: a New History of the Latin-American Photobook,'' January - April 2012. Curated by Horacio Fernandez. *''Northern Ireland (1970-1990): Gilles Peress,'' May–August 2012. Curated by

Gilles Peress Gilles Peress (born December 29, 1946) is a French photographer and a member of Magnum Photos. Peress began working with photography in 1970, having previously studied political science and philosophy in Paris. One of Peress' first projects exa ...

and Diane Dufour. *'' Chris Killip: What Happened: Great Britain 1970-1990'' (originated at Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany) and ''John Smith: The Girl Chewing Gum (1976),'' May–August 2012. *''

: Anticorps,'' January–April 2013. Also shown at Fotomuseum Den Haag, May–September 2012; Spazio Forma, Milan, June–September 2013; and Atsukobarouh, Tokyo, May–July 2015. *'' Mark Cohen: Dark Knees (1969 - 2012),'' September–December 2013. Curated by Diane Dufour. Toured to

Netherlands Photo Museum The Netherlands Photo Museum ( nl, Nederlands Fotomuseum) (NFM) is a photography museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, that was founded in 1989. The museum collection consists of many historical, social and cultural images from the 20th and 21st ...

, Rotterdam, November 2014 – January 2015. *''Young Photographers at Le Bal,'' by Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques, Óscar Monzón, Ricardo Cases, Aleix Plademunt and Antonio M. Xoubanova, December 2013 – January 2014. *''

Kourtney Roy Kourtney Mary Kardashian (born April 18, 1979) is an American media personality and socialite. In 2007, she and her family began starring in the reality television series ''Keeping Up with the Kardashians''. Its success led to the creation of ...

: Ils Pensent Déjà que je Suis Folle'' (They Already Think I’m Crazy), April–May 2014. A series for Carte Blanche PMU 2013 (award for young photographers).PMU, Pari mutuel urbain, is the French state-controlled betting system. *''Lewis Baltz: Common Objects,'' May–August 2014. *''S’il y a Lieu je Pars Avec Vous,'' by

Sophie Calle Sophie Calle (born 9 October 1953) is a French writer, photographer, installation artist, and conceptual artist. Calle's work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and evokes the French literary movement known as Oulipo. ...

, Julien Magre, Stéphane Couturier, Alain Bublex and Antoine D'Agata, September–October 2014. *''

Dirk Braeckman Dirk Braeckman (born 1958 in Eeklo, Belgium) is a Belgian photographer who lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. The artist studied photography and film at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent from 1977 until 1981. Photography career Dirk Bra ...

,'' November 2014 – January 2015. *''Léa Habourdin et Thibault Brunet: Les Immobiles.'' January 2015. A series for Carte Blanche PMU 2014 (award for young photographers). *''Ponte City: Mikhael Subotzky & Patrick Waterhouse,'' January–April 2014. *'' Mark Lewis: Above and Below,'' February–May 2015. *''Images of Conviction: The Construction of Visual Evidence,'' June–August 2015. Then toured to

The Photographers' Gallery The Photographers' Gallery was founded in London by Sue Davies opening on 14 January 1971, as the first public gallery in the United Kingdom devoted solely to photography. It is also home to the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, established in ...

, London. *''Samuel Gratacap: Empire / Le Bal Award for Young Artists with ADAGP,'' September–October 2015. Curated by Pascal Beausse. *''A Handful of Dust - From the Cosmic to the Domestic,'' by David Campany, October 2015 – January 2016. *''Provoke: Between Protest and Performance - Photography in Japan 1960-1975,'' September–December 2016. Curated by Diane Dufour, Matthew Witkovsky and Duncan Forbes.

Publications

*''Anonymes: L’Amérique sans nom: Photographie et Cinéma'' (Anonymous: Unnamed America in Photography and Film).'' Paris: Le Bal; Göttingen: Steidl, 2010. . Edited by

and Diane Dufour. Text by Campany. Photographs by

, Walker Evans, Chauncey Hare,

, Standish Lawder,

, Anthony Hernandez, Arianna Arcara & Luca Santese, and Bruce Gilden. French and English. *''Les Carnets du Bal #1: L'Image-Document, Entre Réalité et Fiction.'' Paris: Le Bal; Marseille: Images en Manoeuvre, 2010. Texts by Jean-Christophe Bailly,

Alain Bergala Alain Bergala (; born 8 August 1943), is a French film critic, essayist, screenwriter and director. Biography Former writer for ''Cahiers du cinéma'', he is best known as a specialist in the works of Jean-Luc Godard. He taught at the Universi ...

Victor Burgin Victor Burgin (born 1941) is a British artist and writer. Burgin first came to attention as a conceptual artist in the late 1960s (Harrison & Wood, 1992; Walker, 2001) and at that time was most noted for being a political photographer of the le ...

, David Campany, Clément Chéroux, Jean-Paul Colleyn,

Georges Didi-Huberman Georges Didi-Huberman FBA (born 13 June 1953) is a French philosopher and art historian. Biography Georges Didi-Huberman was born on 13 June 1953 in Saint-Étienne. He has been a scholar at the French Academy in Rome (Villa Medici) and resid ...

Johan Grimonprez Johan Grimonprez (born 1962) is a Belgium, Belgian multimedia artist, filmmaker, and curator. He is most known for his films ''Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y'' (1997) which the Guardian included in its articlFrom Warhol to Steve McQueen: a history of video ar ...

, Khalil Joreige, Gilles Mouëllic, Muriel Pic, Jean-Pierre Rehm and Susan Meiselas. *''Les Carnets du Bal #2: L'Image Déjà là, Usages de l'Objet Trouvé Photographique et Cinématographique.'' Marseille: Images en Manoeuvres, 2011. . Text in French. *''Les Carnets du Bal #3: les Images Manquantes.'' Marseille: Images en Manoeuvres, 2012. . Text in French. *''The Makes.'' By Eric Baudelaire. Juxtaposes never-filmed scenarios written by

Michelangelo Antonioni Michelangelo Antonioni (, ; 29 September 1912 – 30 July 2007) was an Italian filmmaker. He is best known for directing his "trilogy on modernity and its discontents"—''L'Avventura'' (1960), ''La Notte'' (1961), and ''L'Eclisse'' (1962 ...

with anonymous photographs from post-war Japanese cinema. *''Les Carnets du Bal #4: Que Peut une Image?.'' By Dork Zabunyan, Diane Dufour and Christine Vidal. Paris:

; Paris: Le Bal; Marseille: Textuel, 2014. . Text in French. *''Les Carnets du Bal #5: La Persistance des Images.'' Diane Dufour and Christine Vidal. Paris: Le Bal; Paris: Textuel; Paris:

, 2014. Text in French. *''Anticorps.'' By

. Madrid: Xavier Barral; Paris: Le Bal, 2013. . Text in French. *''Dark Knees''. By Mark Cohen. Paris: Editions Xavier Barral; Paris: Le Bal, 2013. . *''Ils Pensent Déjà que je Suis Folle'' (They Already Think I’m Crazy). By Kourtney Roy. PMU; Paris: Le Bal; Trézélan: Filigranes, 2013. . For Carte Blanche PMU 2013 (award for young photographers). English and French. *''Empire.'' By Samuel Gratacap. Paris: Le Bal; Trézélan: Filigranes, 2015. . English and French. *''Images of Conviction: The Construction of Visual Evidence.'' Editions Xavier Barral and Le Bal, 2015. . Diane Dufour with Luce Lebart, Christian Delage and Eyal Weizman. With contributions by Jennifer L. Mnookin, Anthony Petiteau, Tomasz Kizny, Thomas Keenan, and Eric Stover. English version. *''Les Immobiles: Léa Habourdin & Thibault Brunet: Carte Blanche PMU 2014.'' PMU; Paris: Le Bal; Trézélan: Filigranes, 2015. . French-language version. *''A Handful of Dust.'' By David Campany. Accompanied by an exhibition at Le Bal. **London: Mack; Paris: Le Bal, 2015. . English-language version. **''Dust: Histoires de poussière: D'après Man Ray et Marcel Duchamp.'' London: Mack; Paris: Le Bal, 2015. . French-language version.

Notes

References

External links

*
Le Bal Books
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bal, le Arts organizations based in France 2010 establishments in France Art galleries established in 2010 Tourist attractions in Paris Art museums and galleries in Paris Buildings and structures in the 18th arrondissement of Paris Book publishing companies of France Visual arts publishing companies Coffeehouses and cafés in Paris Restaurants in Paris