With three different covers, this monograph gathers for the firts time the series The Others that Olivier Culmann initated in 2009 while living in India. For this work, he chose to use his own image as a tool to explore social fantasies and the suestions of self and otherness. Fascinated by popular imagery and codes of staged photography, he used as a base material a series of portraits rendering the variety of components contribuing to building individual identity : religion, caste, social class, occupation and regional origin. Olivier Culmann explore in the series, the limits of photography by questioning the construction of social status through practices of self-representation.

Several essays enlighten us on the multiple facets of this work :

Christian Caujolle, associate professor at the Ecole National Supérieur Louis-Lumière, independent curator

François Cheval, director of the Museum Nicephore Niepce

Christopher Pinney, professor of Anthropology and visual culture at University College London