Melos

Guillaume Lebrun, born in 1976 in Saint-Malo, is a French photographer whose work explores regions steeped in history, particularly around the Mediterranean and the Balkans. Since the early 2000s, he has been photographing traces of the past, abandoned places, and the people who inhabit them, drawing inspiration from literature, cinema, and European history.

Presented at the Galerie Intervalle in 2016, Melos is the result of several trips undertaken between 2006 and 2012, from Istanbul to Thessaloniki via Bulgaria and Greece. Together with writer René Daligault, Lebrun traverses these territories where languages, cultures, religions, and identities have intertwined over the centuries. Ruins, landscapes, and portraits of young people compose an imaginary geography, where the present seems to bear the traces of the past. Straddling melancholy and hope, Melos thus explores the construction of a European identity through its borders, its divisions, and its memory.