A Dream of Ruins Lit by the Strobe Light──Leticia Le Four's "Le Crépuscule des Lieux"

Le Crepuscule des Lieux (RVB Books, 2025)

The Paris-based publisher RVB Books has, through its outstanding curation and design, become a leading presence in the photobook and art book world. Last year, they launched a new initiative in collaboration with the luxury hotel group Belmond: the publishing project "AS SEEN BY".

Those who have visited the IACK store or our booth at events will surely have come across these elegantly presented books. "AS SEEN BY" is a series in which artists are dispatched to Belmond’s hotels or sleeper trains to produce work during their stay, which RVB Books then publishes in the form of a photobook. While each issue shares the same format, the printing and choice of paper vary depending on the project, ensuring that these books are not mere promotional items but are respected as independent photobooks in their own right.

All titles except for the out-of-print "Caruso" (via RVB Books website)

That said, I want to focus on a different topic rather than this series. "Caruso" drew particular attention among the first batch of "AS SEEN BY" titles, which published two to three volumes per season. This time, however, I will turn to a new book by its author, Letizia Le Fur.

The Genealogy of a Light That Exposes Rawness

In her new photobook, "Le Crépuscule des Lieux", Le Fur leads readers into a strange, almost fairytale-like world, quite different from the Italian landscapes suffused with beautiful orange hues in her previous book. The setting is filled with objects lingering in abandoned houses and castles—bereft of owners, yet still bearing traces of their presence. But these ruins are not the desolate, romantically decayed spaces one might imagine. What Le Fur has photographed are ruins that are dazzlingly colourful and ornate, almost overwhelming to the eye yet suffused with a peculiar emptiness.

Although there is no direct connection with "Caruso", the shooting style is consistent across the two books. What links them and gives this new work an even more powerful visual effect is the bold use of flash. By directing the flash straight towards her subjects, the images gain uniform sharpness and clarity, with motifs rendered in highly saturated colours.

It is worth pausing here to briefly trace the context of flash in photographic expression. One of the earliest photographers to employ flash as an expressive tool was Arthur Fellig (1899–1968), better known as Weegee. Monitoring police radio, Weegee would rush to crime scenes ahead of others, photographing incidents and accidents under the harsh glare of his flash. His photographs left a tremendous impact on society; even today, they remain shocking, impossible to replicate.

[Black Buick with dead passenger pulled out of the Harlem River, New York], February 23, 1942 © Weegee Archive/International Center of Photography（via the Magnum Photos' website)

Originally, flash was invented simply to clearly photograph subjects in the dark. But for him, flash was not merely a tool to enhance visibility at night; it was a means of laying bare the rawness of the scene. Unlike documentary usage aimed at “recording the whole accurately”, his use of flash produced scandalous, extreme images. The acclaim that elevated both his photographs and himself to fame reflected, in essence, the modern appetite for the grotesque.

Similarities to "Zuma" and Le Fur’s Advancement

Flash photography was subsequently embraced in street and documentary contexts as an expressive tool, reinterpreted differently in each era. Le Fur’s use of flash can also be situated within this genealogy of “exposing the essence of the subject.” Yet before looking closely at her approach, it is necessary to mention "Zuma", the seminal work of American artist John Divola (b. 1949), who employed flash in another direction.

"Zuma" was a series Divola created in 1977–78 at a ruin he stumbled upon at Zuma Beach in Southern California. The building bore countless traces of fire department trainings, intruders’ acts of destruction, and graffiti. Divola himself also intervened, recording these layered transformations. Inside, debris lay scattered across the floors, while dramatic seascapes and sunsets opened up beyond the windows and doors. By firing a strong flash indoors, Divola illuminated the space evenly, flattening foreground, middle ground, and background—the interior and the exterior view alike. The work was visualised through architecture, the interplay of spatial transformations, visual elements, and the artist’s own intervention. Flash achieved spatial homogenisation, flattening, and a vividly heightened colour.

Zuma Series (folder two) / Zuma #14 by John Divola, 1978 (via the artist’s website)

In terms of both location (ruins) and method (flash), Le Fur’s work shares something with Divola. Indeed, a series preceding this book on her website carries a shooting style that recalls Zuma. In that sense, it is possible to read this book within a framework similar to that of Divola. Yet the meanings of location and technique in her work differ greatly from "Zuma". Flash is again used to emphasise detail and bring out vivid colours, but while in Divola’s case flash served to homogenise layers within a “formalist experiment in art photography”, in Le Fur’s case it opens onto a different register—one that can also be read through the post-1990s context of fashion photography, epitomised by Jürgen Teller.

Photographers of this new generation brought the shock effect of flash, first uncovered by Weegee, into the sphere of luxury fashion. With a grotesquely raw realism, they overturned established aesthetics—though these aesthetics themselves eventually ossified into a luxury style. *¹ The impact spread beyond fashion into other fields, becoming a dominant expressive code. Seen in this light, Le Fur’s flash use resonates with fashion photography: it accentuates both the stylishness of the image and the opulence, as well as the emptiness, of the objects inhabiting the ruins.

Unlike Divola, who photographed entire rooms, Le Fur never reveals the whole. The space arises only from fragments pieced together, forcing the reader into an act of imagination. The substitute for that whole is precisely the space of the book as a medium. The structure of this book reflects contemporary visual culture in a unique way, and its design further amplifies its potential.

This book mimics the smartphone screen—that is, the visual structure of the SNS era. What does this mean? If one imagines each spread as a screen or timeline, then the act of turning the page becomes equivalent to “scrolling upward”. A photo partly cropped at the bottom of one page reappears at the top of the next before flowing on further. Though the pages are opened horizontally, the images unfold as if in a vertical scroll. This layout is an attempt to transpose the visual culture of our age back into the analogue form of the book, while the swift pace of the timeline underscores the impermanence of ornate décor and objects.

The images scroll as you read.

Objects as Representations of Desire

For some readers with closer cultural backgrounds, the book may evoke “the melancholy of ownerless things” or “the relationship between objects and their absent owners.” But I did not sense this strongly. Rather, what I perceived in the chaos of the book was the figure of objects embodying human desire, beyond melancholy or relationality. The garish sheen and flatness brought about by flash, and the history of flash in photographic expression, serve only to accentuate their sinister aura.

Visually, the book is colourful, pop-up, and beautiful. However, enjoying this book solely for its beauty risks reproducing emptiness, just as those in power can strategically embrace subversive expression. What deserves attention instead is how the book lays bare the codes of contemporary imagery—namely, “what subjects, shot in what way, generate what kinds of images”—while, like Weegee, also exposing the desires of contemporary humanity.

This desire manifests as chaos due to the clash between the book, representing old media, and the fleeting nature of SNS. A book, as a slow medium, stands in opposition to the flow of SNS, persisting as a material object in the world. However, the design of this book evokes a sense of swift movement, while the use of flash creates contradictions in its elaborate furnishings. Thus, the intense vitality of colour and texture emerges vividly from the page. Out of these clashing contradictions, the book imparts to the reader a chaotic visual impression.

In this colourful and tumultuous space emerge not merely objects, nor ruins, but the figure of humanity laid bare.

(1) The transformation of fashion photography in the 1990s cannot, of course, be explained solely by the use of flash. The spread of compact cameras, as well as the rise of a new generation of fashion designers, all combined to create a seismic shift. To grasp these changes fully, one must also take into account the trends and ideas of the preceding generation.

Article by Yukihito Kono (1 October, 2025)

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Title: Le Crépuscule des Lieux
Artist: Letizia Le Fur
Publisher: RVB Books, 2025
Format: Softcover
Size: 220 × 310 mm
Pages: 180, with 94 photographs
Language: French
Edition: First edition
ISBN: 978-2-492175-61-9
Price: ¥6,710

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