MARTINELLI, Carlo. Debord, la foto rubata. [Faenza]: All’Insegna del Babbomorto, February 2026. Second edition. 16 p.; 15 x 21 cm.; stapled wrappers, cream stock, title and monogram printed in dark red; cover illustration reproducing, in half-tone, the photograph of Guy Debord published in Paris Match of 6 April 1984.

A short prose piece devoted to a single episode: the appearance, in the 6 April 1984 issue of Paris Match, of a grainy, evidently clandestine photograph of Guy Debord, captioned as having caught the “mysterious guru of Lebovici” at his shuttered first-floor apartment in Arles. Martinelli uses the photograph as a hinge to recount the aftermath of Gérard Lebovici’s murder in the Avenue Foch car park on 5 March 1984, and the months of press surveillance that followed at Debord’s door — journalists and photographers staking out the square by the town hall, hoping for a glimpse through the shutters.

The most substantial portion of the text is a first-hand account supplied by Pierre Besson (“Bessompierre”), who describes acting as go-between for Debord and his wife Alice during this period — arranging their comings and goings to avoid the waiting photographers, and eventually helping identify and photograph in turn one journalist who had staked out a neighboring gallery. A second attempt by Paris Match nonetheless succeeded, via a complicit neighbor’s window overlooking the courtyard, in producing the blurred telephoto image that ran as a full page.

Martinelli closes with Debord’s own retrospective account, drawn from Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici (1985), and two of his sharper lines on the episode — on the undesirability of becoming, in fighting the spectacle, a further object of it, and on discretion as something out of fashion in the period. A closing note records the 2,7 million euro purchase of Debord’s archive by the French state after his death, and the Beaubourg’s exhibition Guy Debord, un art de la guerre.

Not on OCLC or in the trade