Jean-Christophe Ballot : L’Épopée de Gilgamesh: 
at La Suite du Huit, as a part of Photo Days Paris

More than four millennia ago, Mesopotamia gave rise to one of humanity’s earliest narratives:
L’Épopée de Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. At once triumphant and mortal, Gilgamesh links past and present, courage and doubt, friendship and mourning. This tension underpins Jean-Christophe Ballot’s photographic reinterpretation.

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A sculptor of light, the artist unfolds a black-and-white series that restores presence to millennia-old works: sculptures, reliefs and fragments preserved notably in the Louvre Museum, the British Museum, the Vorderasiatisches Museum and the National Museum of Iraq. Through the precision of his framing and the density of greys, these figures leave the inertia of display cases to become faces, gestures, breaths once more.

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To set the myth back within the vastness of a territory, Ballot also photographs sites in southern Mesopotamia: horizon lines, ruins, dust, winds. The landscapes respond to the artefacts and open a space where deep time surfaces. Together they form a meditation on the fragility of civilisations and the persistence of their traces — on what disappears and what endures.

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Here, photography does not illustrate the epic; it awakens it. Through light and the rhythm of his shots, Ballot turns remains and sites into active presences, making the image a threshold where memory, loss and the enduring power of myths are played out anew.