22 - Olivier Metzger - Somewhere and Somehow

Jul 6, 2026 – Oct 4, 2026

Olivier Metzger works with light like a director, sculpting images in a delicate chiaroscuro, often tinged with melancholy. His photographs, with their dreamlike quality, draw us into an uncertain world, one that seems ready to dissolve. At age 28, he enrolled at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles in 2001 and gradually invented a fictional world haunted by cinema. He infuses it with strange lights and hazy colors that detach the subjects, both famous and anonymous people, from their reality and transport them into another dimension. “Fiction aids our understanding of reality, without distorting it,” he explained to Libération in 2012. A photographer of strangeness, Olivier Metzger sought out what light could reveal of buried secrets. In 2022, Olivier Metzger died suddenly in an accident, leaving behind a deeply human body of work, attentive to the vulnerability and beauty of the world. In the spring of 2023, the Rencontres de la Photographie asked Éric Reinhardt to curate a tribute to his photographic work. The writer immersed himself in Metzger’s work and curated a collection that reflects the uniqueness and diversity of his universe, while also telling a story. He wanted “for us to feel just how deeply driven, profound, complex, and inspired this artist was, as if he were photographing his own destiny when he worked, as if, every time he took a commissioned photograph, something more powerful, more intimate, more enigmatic and tormented was at play—something that had to do with him, his imagination, his obsessions, his fears, perhaps.” This exhibition is co-produced by La Filature, with support from Scène nationale de Mulhouse, modds agency, the French Ministry of Culture, La Navette, fonds de dotation de la Scène nationale and My Provence.