Cinés Méditerranée documents the endangered cinema architecture of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Lebanon through Stephan Zaubitzer's large-format photography — a visual archive of spaces that exist, for many, only in memory.
About This Book
For nearly two decades, Stephan Zaubitzer has pursued a singular project: photographing cinemas — operating and abandoned — across the world with a large-format camera. This volume narrows that lens to five countries along the southern Mediterranean coast, where cinema architecture carries the weight of colonial history, cultural aspiration, and neglect. The result is less a nostalgia exercise than a precise architectural inventory, one that insists on the civic and optical logic embedded in these buildings. Prefaced by film theorist Alain Bergala and accompanied by a cartographic survey of the series, the book was produced in conjunction with an exhibition at La Chapelle des Pénitents Bleus in La Ciotat — itself situated opposite the Eden, widely recognised as the world's oldest cinema.
Key Features
- 136 pages of large-format architectural photography spanning five Mediterranean countries
- Preface by Alain Bergala; photography by Stephan Zaubitzer
- Cartographic vision mapping the cinemas across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Lebanon
- Published by Building Books, ISBN: 9782492680014
What You'll Discover
- How cinema architecture in the southern Mediterranean encodes the laws of optics as spatial and civic logic
- The tension between operative and inoperative cinemas — buildings caught between function, ruin, and cultural memory
- A cartographic dimension that transforms individual photographs into a regional architectural survey
- The relationship between photographic method — large-format, deliberate, precise — and the subject matter of spaces built for projection and illusion
About the Author
Stephan Zaubitzer is a photographer who has spent almost twenty years documenting cinema architecture across the globe using a large-format camera, producing an inventory of spaces governed by the laws of optics. Alain Bergala, who contributes the preface, is a film theorist and critic whose writing on cinema history and culture is widely read in both academic and practitioner contexts.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 136
- Dimensions: 230 x 300 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9782492680014
- Publisher: Building Books
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and photographers interested in adaptive reuse and heritage; researchers in Mediterranean urban culture; collectors of architectural photography; anyone drawn to the intersections of cinema history and built form.