Latitudes

The International Center of Photography presents Latitudes, an exhibition in partnership with the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris. In its current iteration, Latitudes highlights new work by two laureate-artists from Côte d’Ivoire– Nuits Balnéaires and François-Xavier Gbré.

About Latitudes

Launched in 2024, Latitudes is a Fondation d’entreprise Hermès program developed in partnership with the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris and the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. 

It broadens the scope of Immersion, the former French-American photography commission created in 2014 with the same partners, a cross-residency between France and the United States. 

The new program supporting contemporary creation takes its name from a geographical concept, affirming its ambition to shed light on artists from scenes that are still underrepresented on the international stage. In practice, the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson and the ICP select a country from which photographers are invited to submit a project. A jury composed of representatives from the three institutions selects the annual laureate. 

The chosen photographer receives a grant to produce a new series. The resulting work is exhibited in Paris at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, in New York at the ICP, and finally in the laureate’s home country. 

Côte d’Ivoire is the first country to be honored in the two-year cycle inaugurated in 2024. 

About Nuits Balnéaires

Multidisciplinary artist and poet Nuits Balnéaires was born and raised in Abidjan, into a family with Akan Agni-Bona and Malinké origins. With intimate connections to both peoples’ traditions, culture and spirituality, his work creates a parallel space-time beyond the constraints of geography, while embracing the universality of oceans as the connective tissue between worlds. 

Nuits Balnéaires cultivates powerful ties with the energy of the Gulf of Guinea and  its landscapes, hence the omnipresence of water in his photographic practice, films and poetry. Haunted by the duality of life and death, and the possibility of communication between these states, his works convey a euphoric sense of tranquillity that feels both classical and contemporary.  

In 2019, Nuits Balnéaires settled in Grand-Bassam, Côte d’Ivoire, to develop his artistic practice, drawing on his years as a fashion and conceptual photographer. He secured  a one-year bursary in visual journalism with the World Press Photo Foundation, and was among the winners of a 2020 call for projects from the Goethe-Institut and the Prince Claus Fund, which supports cultural and artistic responses to environmental change. Nuits Balnéaires’s work has been exhibited at Art X Lagos, Paris’s 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, FNB Art Johannesburg, and in numerous exhibitions across Côte  d’Ivoire, Canada, the US, the UK, France, the Netherlands and Australia.

About François-Xavier Gbré

Born in 1978 in Lille, France. François-Xavier Gbré lives and works between La Rochelle (France) and Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire). 

Steeped in time and geography, Gbré’s work draws on the language of architecture as a witness to memory and social change. From colonial remains to landscapes redefined by current events, Gbré explores territories and revisits History. The constant dialogue with his environment leads him to use different scales and exhibition methods, whether crafting meticulous installations based on thorough investigations of the land, or using architecture itself to make photography resonate through a physical relationship with the viewer or the public space. 

His work has been shown in Paris and Abidjan at the Cécile Fakhoury Gallery, which represents him, at the Dakar Biennale in Senegal, the Venice Biennale in Italy, in Madagascar, Nigeria, the United States, and various European countries. 

His works are included, among others, in the collections of the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, USA), Tate Modern (London, UK), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), the Walther Collection (Neu-Ulm, Germany – New York, USA), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (USA), the Collection of the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles (France), and the FNAC – Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (France).   

In 2020, François-Xavier Gbré was awarded the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles. In 2024, he becomes the first laureate of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès Latitudes program.