Grégoire Korganow boards the French container ship Marius and crosses the Atlantic, then the Pacific. From Le Havre to the Panama Canal, from Tahiti to Sydney, he shares the daily life of a cosmopolitan crew and reveals the discreet beauty of gestures, faces, and machines.
No heroes or mythical silhouettes here: concrete men, confined to tight spaces, bound by rules and watches, with the horizon as their accomplice. Ports, captured at the blue hour, slip from the functional into fiction; the sea becomes substance, a writing of light — its intensities, its shadows, its reflections.
Conceived as an artist’s book, the volume unfolds in five leporellos: on the recto, seascapes; on the verso, portraits of the sailors and views of the ports. A separate booklet gathers Grégoire’s logbook — notes, schedules, snatches of what he hears and feels — for an immersion in which time dilates. Three worlds brush against one another: the sea, the machine, the men. Storms, silences, camaraderie, repeated labors: the ship becomes a workshop, global transport a stage.
Both poetic and documentary, Face à la mer recounts life on board anew and makes the crossing not a border but a path — work, light, and sharing.
Three different images, each printed in an edition of five.
Photo #1
Photo #2
Photo #3
Grégoire Korganow
Photographe
Gregory Korganow Artist Engaged, collaborates as a photojournalist for 20 years with French and international newspapers. Its images are immediately exposed in prestigious places in France and internationally. His work result from a process of counting and utopia, in search of an unspeakable truth or intimacy buried. He is interested in areas left in the shadow of the eyes in France, of which he causes a sober and raw reality. His gaze on the body, sensitive territory of which he reveals contrary movements (tensions and relaxation, constraint and freedom, power and fragility, presence and disappearance …), leads him to take an interest in the performance and to integrate the medium of the film in the realization of his works. His work is dedicated by prizes and selections to many festivals.
Mélanie Roger, a graduate of Audencia Business School, has been leading major cultural projects in France and internationally since 2004. Head of production at Ballet Preljocaj, then at La Baraka, Emanuel Gat Dance and MAD/Ballet du Nord, she subsequently became Deputy Director of Philippe Decouflé’s company DCA, before joining the association Kaplan (Amala Dianor) as Executive Director, a position she holds until 2025. As an independent dance curator, notably for the Louvre Museum between 2019 and 2022, she has devised projects with leading choreographers. Alongside Grégoire Korganow, she co-founded Libre Champ in 2014, curates several of the artist’s major photographic series, produces exhibitions shown in France and abroad, and initiates video-dance projects.