Buchkunst Berlin opens the autumn season of 2026 with *Le Bleu Secret*, a solo exhibition dedicated to the French photographer Dolorès Marat.

Les Anges, Deauville, 1986. Courtesy Buchkunst Berlin

Les oiseaux de New York (Exit), 1999. Courtesy Buchkunst Berlin

La femme Croco, Paris, 2000. Courtesy Buchkunst Berlin

The exhibition brings together key works from her body of work and transports the viewer into a visual world that lies between twilight and night, observation and memory.

The title *Le Bleu Secret* – the secret blue – takes the viewer straight into Dolorès Marat’s visual world.

Many of her photographs are taken during that elusive transition between day and night: at twilight, as the evening light begins to fall, or in the early hours of the morning.

These are moments when reality loses its clarity and familiar places and everyday situations suddenly appear strange, poetic or enigmatic.

The ‘blue’ in the title refers less to a specific colour than to a state of being. Marat’s photographs oscillate between closeness and distance, the present and memory.

People emerge from the darkness and vanish again; animals become silent protagonists; artificial light transforms streets, interiors and bodies.

Movements leave traces; contours begin to dissolve. Marat photographs intuitively and swiftly. She reacts to situations that move her directly, rather than staging them.

The motion blur characteristic of her work is not a post-production effect, but the visible trace of this spontaneous approach to the subject.

From instinct and precision, from an extraordinary feel for light, colour and composition, a distinctive photographic language emerges.

What is seen always remains real – and yet seems to transform into something else at the very moment the photograph is taken.

Short biography of Dolorès Marat

Dolorès Marat, born in Paris in 1944 and now living in Provence, developed her personal photographic practice largely as a self-taught artist. After working as a seamstress, a photographer in a Parisian neighbourhood and a laboratory assistant for the magazine *Votre Beauté*, she began working independently at the age of 39.

Alongside her freelance work, she has photographed for clients including Hermès, J.M. Weston and Leica, as well as for French newspapers and magazines such as *Libération*, *Le Monde* and *Les Inrockuptibles*.

In recent years, her work has increasingly attracted international institutional attention. In 2020, Marat donated 200 prints of her work to the Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine, part of the French Ministry of Culture.

In 2023, the Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles dedicated the solo exhibition *Dérèglement chromatique* to her. In the same year, a monograph was published in the Photo Poche series, and Marat received the Robert Delpire Book Prize. In 2024, this was followed by an exhibition featuring more than 60 works at the Fondation Sozzani in Paris, organised by the Fonds de dotation Neuf Cinq – Robert Delpire & Sarah

Moon and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie.

Opening: