Anne Pery (1973-2003) was discovered by the collector Bernard Lamarche-Vadel. She accumulated images; she was never without her camera. Anne Pery fed off the in-between, producing fragmentary landscapes and portions of bodies. She was in New York in 2001 for the attack on the World Trade Center, and photographed the streets where the patriotism of a population shone through a multitude of flags. The museum proposes an overview of her little seen work which was donated to the Museum in 2008 by her family.

Anne Pery’s work is based on what she considered to be a form of « visual indiscretion », an « urgent link to detail ». She captured tiny scraps of the world around her, photographing them as they seemed to reveal everything. She thought she could transform her uncertainties into certainties through pictures.

As a young graduate of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles, Anne Pery got to know Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, art critic and collector. He noticed the originality of her work and selected extracts of it for the exhibition / installation  «L’enfermement photographique » (Photographic lockdown), presented at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie during the winter of 1998-1999. Her encounter with Bernard Lamarche-Vadel was to become a turning point in Anne Pery’s professional career. Beyond their evident intellectual common ground, they were to become close friends. Their exchanges brought her to realise the need to reflect on an artistic project and to show her work while up until then the only audience for her work was herself.

Anne Pery’s early photographic research examined her own questions about the gap between the imagined and the real. « Does what I see exist or is it the fruit of my imagination? ». The shot renders the impression, the visual feeling authentic. But she also cast doubt on the subject represented by a fragmentary approach, where the detail became an object in itself. The close framing disconnects certain elements from their context and gives them a new existence. The paws of a cat become worrying claws, the face of a friend transforms into a serene landscape.