SUMER
Óscar Monzón, Arthur Larrue
- 21,6 x 13,5 cm
- Soft cover
- 204 pages
- Photographs by Óscar Monzón (144 p.)
- Text by Arthur Larrue (64 p.)
- ISBN 978-2-492175-64-0
SUMER is a striking collaboration between photographer Óscar Monzón and writer Arthur Larrue. Bringing image and text together, the book blends a powerful photographic series with a dystopian narrative set in a hyper-connected world-city shaped by highways, flows, and consumer culture. Through the marginal figures of Óscar and Gabrielle, the project explores themes of exclusion, control, and desire. Combining strong visual storytelling with a compelling literary voice, SUMER offers a distinctive and immersive reading experience at the crossroads of photography, fiction, and contemporary social critique.
« By travelling at breakneck speed, moving from one static point to another through a vehicular parenthesis, reality had somehow slipped away for the Sumerians. They could only see it through a window or on a screen. »
Born in 1981 in Málaga, Spain, and based in Madrid, Óscar Monzón is a photographer, video, and sound artist. He studied photography at the Artediez School in Madrid before co-founding the collective BlankPaper. He has published, among others, the book ORDER (RVB Books, 2021). His first book, KARMA (RVB Books, 2013), received the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award in 2013.
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Born in Paris in 1984, Arthur Larrue is a French novelist. He taught French literature at Herzen University in Saint Petersburg for four years before being forced to leave Russian Federation territory following the publication of his first novel, Partir en guerre (Allia, 2013), which recounts his clandestine life with the dissident artist group Voïna (« war » in Russian). He translated The Nose by Nikolai Gogol (Allia, 2014) His novels Orlov la nuit (Gallimard, 2019) and La diagonale Alekhine (Gallimard, 2021) are published in seven languages.