Agreements

Preorder now for delivery in late November 2026.

Véronique Besnard’s Agreements offers an inquiry into the imprint left by political and military relations upon the spaces where power is exercised and negotiated.

Developed alongside her formal professional practice during several years of working alongside the French ministère des Armées, this long-term visual journal presents a strikingly clinical, sanitized facade, as military processes unfold behind closed doors, with no ripple to betray the deceptive tranquility of these settings. Objects gathered during her travels — figurines, scale models, or formal diplomatic gifts — infuse an artificial quality into this very real world. Her photographic approach renders palpable the staggering silence that precedes an explosion. 

Interspersed with notes from her diaries, the images become unmoored and disorienting as the artist moves between luncheons and meetings, luxury hotels and conference centres, always observed while in the process of observing, as she attempts to unravel the relationships between subject and object, capital and morality.

Moving away from a performative depiction of conflicts and their consequences, Besnard proposes an alternative path: one that is deceptively contemplative, more subterranean, and inherently ambiguous. Her reflective style — which creates a distance from a present that can at times become overwhelming — stands in powerful contrast to an observation made by Stefan Zweig in 1941: "Technology has brought no greater curse upon us than by making it impossible — even for a single second — to escape the present."

Art Historian
Head of the Photography Collections
at the Musée de l’Armée

AUTHOR: Véronique Besnard
TITLE: Agreements
PUBLICATION YEAR: 2026
ISBN: 978-1-957301-13-6
208 pages
170x240x22mm, 788 grams
EDITION: 350; First edition, first printing