Hervé Guibert: Voyages en Italie

For centuries, traveling to Italy has been as much a cultural pilgrimage as a touristic one, inspiring painters, architects, musicians, at least one filmmaker (Roberto Rossellini and his eponymous film), and several writers (Stendhal, among others).

Hervé Guibert, through the frame of his camera, brings a literary as well as intense photographic resonance to his voyage in Italy—both untimely and exiled.

Over time, from the Villa Medici in Rome, where he lived from 1987 to 1989, to the island of Elba, where he has been buried since 1992, through jaunts in Sicily and escapades in Florence, he created a carousel of black-and-white images. This black-and-white is Hervé Guibert’s The Red and the Black, as Stendhal described his Julien Sorel: beautiful, supremely beautiful, with eyes "that, in quiet moments, revealed both thought and fire."