After a well-received retrospective at the Espace Electra in Paris November 4th 04 > February 20th 05 a second exhibition in Chalon-sur-Saône completes the presentation of the photographic work of Eustache Kossakowski March 12th 05 > May 22nd 05. The Parisian retrospective logically covered all of his work that began in Poland at the end of the Second World War, then blossomed in France to come to an ironic and knowing end in the Polish countryside (Broken fences).
The exhibition at the musée Nicéphore Niépce concentrates on the first of his series to be created and exhibited in France in 1971 : 6 meters before Paris, 159 objective photographs... by Eustache Kossakowski. The series is made up of 159 images and was inaugurated in 1971 at the musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
After a European tour (Stockholm and Rome in particular), the entire series which was part of French public collection disappeared for reasons that have never been explained. Only two originals remain. The exhibition in the musée Nicéphore Niépce is doubly important as it presents the entire series reconstituted by the lab from the original negatives for the first time since the
seventies, the negatives were made available by Mme. Anka Ptaszkowska.
Thirty five years after its presentation, this reconstitution establishes 6 meters before Paris as one of the very first truly conceptual visions of photography, but also as a rare, almost ethnological insight, into the changes the French capital has gone through in the interim.
This exhibition was made possible thanks to the invaluable cooperation of Anka Ptaszkowska. Patrick Komorowski made the project possible.
Sylvain Charles, of the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, printed the new prints with patience and skill to give life to a series that was lost.

None of this would have been possible without the fondation Electra.
So we must thank, Serge Pouxviel, Claude Welty, Nathalie Bazoche, Catherine Guédin, Laurence Prod’homme, Benoît Franqueville. Finally as usual, François Barré organised everything.


“ Paris is a tough city but there were two of us, Eustache and myself. […] We used to spend entire days walking around Paris, with a baguette to keep us going, Eustache with his Rolleiflex. One day, since he used to see ten times more than I did, he pointed out to me a signpost which bore the inscription “Paris”. It’s worth taking a picture of it, he said. And we launched into a formidable adventure: to find, map in hand, the locations of all these signposts.
It was the administrative limit of the city. Eustache, who already had very sound thoughts on the “legitimacy” of a good photograph, with just a millimeter of a difference potentially spoiling it, established one rule for all the signposts: each signpost must be in the centre and photographed at a distance of six meters.
All that surrounded it was due to chance, and we experienced this chance with great happiness.”