LAURENT BENAÏM, CURIOUS ENCOUNTERS, with a text by Dian Hanson

Taschen, 2019, First edition, 215 pp., 9 1/2" X 12", Harcdover

Fine

Benaïm earned his photographic degree in 1982. He set up shop as a conventional photographer, but at heart was a pictorialist, always searching for ways to defeat photographic realism. In 1991 he saw an antique photo with just the look he sought, and through trial and much error taught himself the gum dichromate process. It’s tedious, smelly, and probably poisonous, but Benaïm has used it exclusively since 1996, giving his startling sex photos the look of oversized French postcards, printed, perhaps, in the damp cellar of a Belle Époque whorehouse.