What do a rupture and an epiphany have in common? For the men and women photographed in Francis David’s new book, Un Monde Parfait, both marked the beginning of something new. Days and weeks suddenly became vacant following a retirement, death or separation. And this – coupled with the discovery of new materials or techniques – precipitated the creation of entire worlds. Photographed in France between 1978 and 2025, David’s sitters have filled empty hours by salvaging, sculpting and painting until imagination took material form in their homes. The book reveals walls covered in naive frescoes, shell art and colourful mosaics; lawns filled with topiary, figurative sculptures or miniature Eiffel Towers; scenes at once real and imagined.
David came of age in the 1960s and 70s, when interest in marginal art was at its peak. The work of Claude and Clovis Prévost was formative to his practice, and he speaks with reverence of Bruno Montpied’s more recent inventory in book form, Le Gazouillis des Eléphants. But Un Monde Parfait, edited by Estelle Hanania with an essay by Baptiste Brun, shifts our attention from the ‘making of’ these remarkable worlds to the ‘living within’. David is aware of their fragility; many such homes are dismantled after their owners’ deaths, and he has entrusted 2,200 of his slides to Lisse’s LAM museum for this reason. But his aim is not primarily to archive – it is to illustrate the singular relationship between a maker and their environment. ‘One makes a sculpture of a nude woman two metres tall, another a miniature village. Each time it’s another adventure, another story. That’s what has kept me going,’ he tells WoI from his home in Saint-Nazaire on France’s west coast.
In the book, David describes his own encounter with these places as an epiphany that arrived gradually, then all at once, ‘like a sunset’. In 1977, he visited a total work by Raymond Isidore (WoI Jan 1982), who had died 13 years prior. Isidore’s own revelation came from a pile of shattered dishes that he discovered during his daily walk, prompting him to spend decades sheathing his house, the Maison Picassiette, in mosaics of broken crockery. Soon afterwards, chatter about a ‘madman’ in Châteaudun led David to the home of a M. Jaffrenou, whose own house featured a tower of stairs rising from its side; a new step was added whenever he could afford another bag of cement. Those encounters turned into a decades-long search for people who had similarly responded to upheaval by remaking the very ground beneath their feet.
David photographs these locations as lived realities where, as Brun writes, ‘person and environment merge into an inseparable whole’. He resists isolating single sculptures or motifs from the place that gives them meaning. Finished pieces fill rooms, gardens and courtyards, alongside raw materials and works in progress. Makers, engulfed by their own patchwork creations, meet the camera with pride.
Many have tried to situate them within a distinct artistic lineage, using labels such as art brut or ‘outsider art’, whereas Brun describes them as ‘borrowing at once from the craft traditions of the mason and from the media imagery of politics and popular spectacle’. Lucien Favreau’s painted room in Yviers holds both at once: a cement thinker modelled by hand after Rodin, and behind it a mural of the Treblinka camp copied straight from a photograph in Paris Match. David resists the impulse to categorise – these environments are compelling precisely because of their singularity. And while his book acknowledges that they all ‘belong to the realm of bricolage’, he is cautious not to overstate their similarities. Instead, he encourages new ways of seeing and sharing work that remains marginal in fine art and architecture.
The photographer taught for some 30 years at the Centre de Formation et de Perfectionnement des Journalistes in Paris, specialising in image, portraiture and reportage, and remains concerned with his discipline’s power to reshape our notions of value and taste. Past projects, including a volume on writers at their desks, and a series on British shop fronts, have combined his interest in seriality and context, assembly and portraiture – all on show in Un Monde Parfait. Like the makers featured within its pages, he is drawn to overlooked things. One artist’s hunt for interesting stones mirrors David’s own ritual journeys across France, during which he sought those whose work had been dismissed.
In 2025, David returned to the road, photographing six new makers across France, where the salvage of the 1980s gave way to collections of plastic toys and everyday souvenirs; among them is the so-called Museum of American Trucking, full of scale replicas assembled by Louis Ames at his home in Hirel; the constructor has never once set foot in the United States. David playfully proposes a new category for these works: Art Gifi (a Wilko-style bric-à-brac chain in France).
Some sites have fared better than others, preserved as kitschy restaurants or hotels. Institutions have taken an interest too: Lille’s LaM now keeps a room dedicated to habitants paysagistes, among them pieces by Josué Virgili, whose courtyard in Le Kremlin-Bicêtre was filled with totems, mosaics and found objects. But David remains sceptical. Removing these works from environments that produced them is an institutional dilemma akin to ‘showing one square centimetre of the Mona Lisa’. His book, by contrast, returns them to the people and places that shaped them. He hopes to stir emotions in his readers; as they turn the pages they should ‘lose certain notions they hold about art, and find that it opens up worlds’.
‘Un Monde Parfait’ by Francis David (ed. Estelle Hanania) is published by Myriorama Editions on 26 Sept
A version of this article appears in the October 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers.
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