What are the objects unveiled by Jean-Michel Fauquet's obscure photographs? Extending the umbilical metaphor, these could be called images of birth, or rather original images, so that the objects seem both very ancient and close to an originary violence. Threatening mechanical instruments, seemingly stripped of their function by time, feel as if they come from an era when science's power to destroy or save was still unknown, as at photography's very beginning; the most banal objects, a jacket on a chair, a staircase, are torn from context and made at once new, foreign, monstrous and old.