Galerie Nathalie Obadia is pleased to present a new solo exhibition by Laura Henno, bringing together a selection of photographs from her long-term project Outremonde (2017-present). A finalist for the 2026 Prix Marcel Duchamp, the artist will present Dark Thirty, a new film work developed in resonance with this series, at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris this coming autumn. The exhibition thus marks a pivotal moment in Henno's career, serving as a prelude to this major institutional presentation.
Produced over nearly a decade, Outremonde emerged from Laura Henno's prolonged immersion within a community living in Slab City, in the Californian desert. The series has already been the subject of several significant solo exhibitions, including presentations at the Vieille Église de Mérignac in 2026, the Musée de la Photographie de Charleroi in 2024, and the Rencontres d'Arles in 2018.
For more than twenty years, photographer and filmmaker Laura Henno has developed a body of work that, in the words of Marc Donnadieu, ''illuminates parallel realities relegated to the margins of our contemporary world.'' From Calais to the Comoros Islands and Slab City, her practice seeks to make visible "plural identities, existences, bodies", as the critic further notes.
The territory explored in this series embodies that same impulse. In the Sonoran Desert, near the Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range, the site appears as an enclave that shows on no map, built upon the ruins of an abandoned military base. Around one hundred and fifty inhabitants have found refuge there, living in extremely precarious conditions, without access to water or electricity. Lives are quietly rebuilt, day after day, under the unyielding presence of the desert.
The exhibition is notably inhabited by the figure of Wiser, who dreams of creating a vegetable garden for the most deprived residents of Slab City. Despite his rudimentary camp, two tents battered by desert winds, and the hostile conditions surrounding him, nothing seems to alter the utopian vision that drives him forward. Around him gravitate other characters: Zig, a former Iraq war veteran, and Annie, whose past has been marked by addiction and who finds in him a compassionate listener. These solitary existences intersect and intertwine, tracing through their interactions and shared ideals the contours of a deeply supportive humanity. The inhabitants of Slab City - dreamers and survivors - seem to find, in their everyday gestures, the means to go on shaping, against all odds, a world still worth inhabiting.
To render this territory as faithfully as possible, Laura Henno has returned regularly to Slab City since 2017, herself living in a trailer during these stays. This prolonged immersion allows her to maintain a critical distance from any miserabilist approach.
Her photographs, steeped in the light of dusk, envelop bodies and reveal gazes, restoring a presence to these lives that is at once grounded and tender - what photography historian Michel Poivert calls a ''documentary fable.''
Laura Henno thus constructs several forms of portraiture: portraits of the inhabitants, but also of the desert itself. Within our collective imagination, the desert often appears as an original blank page, a territory of projection where everything still seems possible. Yet this vision quickly collides with the harsh realities of a world shaped by exclusion and precarity. Beneath the crushing heat and the vastness of the horizon, hostility permeates the landscape: every attempt at reconstruction remains fragile, constantly threatened by the echoes of reality, while the nearby Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range disrupts any illusion of permanence.
The title Outremonde borrows from Don DeLillo's novel Underworld the idea of a world withdrawn from collective visibility. Through this series, Laura Henno offers a vision that is at once poetic and grounded in reality, entering into dialogue with the American documentary photography tradition, notably the work of Dorothea Lange. Her practice inscribes itself within a broader history of the margins, where migratory narratives, American mythologies, and contemporary trajectories of exile intersect, echoing in particular John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
Through these photographs, Laura Henno reveals the contours of an invisible geography, restoring to these existences their full political, social, and profoundly human depth.
- Marie Chappaz, Editorial writer
