The 11 Collection: five books, a sixth in the making, and a home online
Five risograph photography books published with Éditions Bessard, a sixth in production with Adel Haddoud and Max Pam, and a new website where every volume can now be explored: the11collection.com.
Everything starts with people.
At Newfund, we say it about investing. A seed investment is a bet on a founder long before it is a bet on a market, and the years that follow rest on trust, shared conviction and the difficult moments faced together. None of this appears in a quarterly report. We wanted to give it a form, something you can hold in your hands, with grain and weight. We found it with Pierre Bessard and Éditions Bessard: a collection of eleven photography books, printed in risograph in Paris.
Each volume brings together an entrepreneur from our portfolio and a photographer. They talk. A word comes out of the conversation. Nobody chooses it in advance: it names the quality the founder relies on to move forward. That word becomes the title of the book, and the photographer answers it with images.
Five books on the shelf
Emergence opened the collection. Joseph Rutakangwa, co-founder of Rwazi, met the Italian photographer Giacomo Brunelli.
Resilience pairs Sara Sebti, founder of ShareID, with the Brazilian photographer Claudia Jaguaribe.
Loyalty comes from the encounter between Matthieu Picon of Tageos and Robin Hammond.
Freedom brings Laurent Morice and Corinne Bruel, the founders of Camping-Car Park, together with the Belgian photographer and writer Philippe Herbet.
Fortitude is the most recent. Paul-Alexis Racine Jourdren, founder of CetteFamille, worked with the Italian duo Jean-Marc Caimi and Valentina Piccinni.
Every book is printed in 250 copies with vegetable-based inks. The risograph leaves visible textures and slight misregistrations, so no two copies are exactly alike.
The sixth: Escape Velocity
The next book is being made now. Escape Velocity, which takes its place as volume 04 in the collection, brings together Adel Haddoud and Max Pam.
Adel founded Infinite Orbits in Toulouse at the end of 2017. The company builds satellites that approach other satellites in orbit to inspect them, protect them and extend their life. It now employs more than 220 people in eight countries. Adel comes from a modest background and built his path through school, from ISAE-SUPAERO to INSEAD. He has kept his roots near Biskra, in Algeria, at the edge of the Sahara, where he grows dates.
Max Pam was born in Melbourne in 1949. At twenty, he left Australia as photographer for an astrophysicist and drove a Volkswagen from Calcutta to London. For more than fifty years since, he has travelled across Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Indian Ocean rim, keeping a journal the whole way. Éditions Bessard published his Ramadan in Yemen in 2012.
Escape velocity is the speed an object needs to break free of a planet's gravity. A founder who sends spacecraft into orbit and a photographer who left home at twenty for the deserts of the East both know something about it.
250 copies, and a website for everyone else
With 250 copies per volume, most of the people who would care about these books will never hold one. That is why we built the11collection.com.
The site gives each volume its own page. You will find the texts written by the founder and by the photographer, the photographic series behind the book, the portraits of both, and the technical sheet. A Founders section and a Photographers section let you follow the collection by person rather than by title. The Making of section shows how the books are designed and printed. Everything is available in English and in French, and each volume page links to Éditions Bessard for those who want the book itself.
Start with Emergence and follow the volumes in order, or open the one whose word speaks to you.
Written with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic). Reach out if you'd like to continue the conversation : francois@newfundcap.com