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Arles - Palais de l’Archevêché - place de la République
Richard Aujard (France)
"Noble Art"
With Richard Aujard, we are entering the hermetically sealed world of the World Champion Boxers through more than ten years' photographies from the great period, that of the 90's.
Richard photographied great Champions who made their mark on the history of the Noble Art through now mythical fights, with Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Christophe and Fabrice Tiozzo, Riddick Bowe, Terry Norris, etc… but also those who are composing the great family of boxing : the promoters, the coaches, the sparring-partners without forgetting the little ones, the future champions.
A lot of fights were photographed in Las Vegas, at the Caesar Palace, the temple of boxing.
All the photos of the Noble Art exhibitions were taken from his book "Champions ", with a preface by Jake LaMotta " The Raging Bull" and Mickey Rourke.
" Boxing needs a lot of guts, of determination, of strength and of passion. The champions in this book gave their greatest potential together with their greatest conquests. Richard managed to capture all that with his penetrating and intriguing photographies."
Jake LaMotta "The Raging Bull" New-York 2006
"I have had the opportunity to follow regularly Richard Aujard's work, I understand even better our 20 years of friendship, since the time when, as a passionate young man, he just began to use à lens. Richard's photos were very inspiring, I think they are powerful. Richard devoted a lot of time and energy to travel across the world to learn and understand the great sport of boxing. He managed to capture the soul he was looking for and to gain the trust of these hard, complicated and intelligent men.
Boxers belong to a rare species. Trustworthy, passionate, inspired and courageous men".
Mickey Rourke, Los-Angeles 2006
Patrick Gomme (France)
“Chair Corps“ (Bodily Flesh)
A perspective without concession that radically stands out comes into our line of vision, one which has been skilfully deluded over the years. It is like stumbling upon the intimate; a crude and bitter truth. Disturbing bodies infringe upon the artificial rule: bodies which are nevertheless comforting and familiar break with the conformity of specious aesthetic. Here, lauded flesh establishes its fierce and touching truism, proclaiming an intimate and fragile, authentic and strong "I".
Voluntarily fragmented, obstinately poetical, this mosaic retraces the path of a forgotten look, following the thread back to aesthetic re-composition. Pockmarked or diaphanous skin, a whitish stomach which come to life with light or a secret face which moves in the half-light, Patrick GOMME translates the sensitive surface of our humanity. Over the course of new details and delicate fragments, a progression reveals the identity of each one, the story of a life whose is to be found in the depths of our exposed folds, shape and scars.
Patrick GOMME has chosen "ordinary" people, who invite us through the discovery of their universe to take another look at our own. So many unusual facets form the universal and consubstantial portrait of the profoundly united body and mind.
Franck Olivas (France)
"Performances Photochorégraphiques" (Photochoregraphic Performances)
Franck Olivas' aim is to make his models and his dancers move with random movements, improvised choregraphies, that he likes to call « freestyle imposed figures » and to capture images through the photographical act, most often in front of an audience.
All the shooting and lighting techniques are used to obtain the effects he has thought of. The images collected from the performance are selected then in order to suggest another vision, while diverting the present observers' memories and offering the confusing fruit of the « over-realization » of his look.
All these dramatizations are imaginary universes, built over fantasmatic frames. In often confined spaces, Olivas is playing in order to hide, then to reveal the bodies, after depriving them from a part of their senses, exacerbating the shapes and the movements. He gives them the opportunity to be forgotten, next to be revealed thanks to the poetry of gestures, like the conductor of an orchestra who, all at once is leading and making free all those he is calling his accomplices, getting from each one of them what they would not have dared to hope from themselves.
In 2011, a part of his works was the subject of a limited publishing, « performing forms », in the form of a multimedia portfolio, the production of which was totally allowed thanks to its public's subscription. Its archives were totally delivered to the National Center of Contemporary Art (Centre National d'Art contemporain) in Nice (Villa Arson), which is carrying out a historical study and an inventory about the Art of Performance in PACA.
Michele Mattiello (Italie)
"Urlo"
"it's not just a portrait, it's humankind screaming, it doesn't want to be seen, it wants to be heard."
I don't remember where I read this sentence, but it guided me throughout the creative process for this project.
I portrayed people while they were expressing their state of mind with a scream, in a critical moment of their lives. They are no models nor actors, but common people who agreed to scream in front of a lens and show their feelings, emotions, rage and sorrow.
It wasn't easy for them, nor was it for me: getting so close to people's intimate feelings is a precious gift, a unique moment. They are moments of deep empathy, captured in fractions of seconds.
Each "print" has been obtained transferring the upper layer of the inkjet print on watercolour paper. This technique creates images that cannot be replicated: each print is unique. As unique as the very moment of the scream.
The printing technique, as well as the subjects portrayed are imperfect and as such they create images that allow the viewer to experience the emotion felt during the shooting moment.
Clotilde Noblet (France)
"Corpsica - Dies Ailleurs - Ziggy "
My photographic approach is developing an instrospective language related to the use of a Polaroid camera. The three Polaroid series I shot take a subjective look at the male body's architecture.
In all the series, that body is reduced to the status of fragments. A transformed, distorted, disfigurated body, I like to play with the ambiguity of shapes, to model the perceptions of the real world. The different framings are sometimes generating an abstract vision.
Through dreamlike staging, my polaroids are questioning the representations of the male body.
Winner of the Réponses Photo contest
Louis BLANC (France)
"Corpus"
Corpus, a series that started almost by chance, from a photo especially created for a contest on a photo forum and which, how amazing to me, won it !
Then, while watching the image with a sort of hindsight and analyzing somewhat puzzled but always positive feedbacks, I suddenly realized that the body, or rather the image of the body as seen through the photographer's lens could arouse questions and even emotion.
So, I felt like carrying on with the experience but to be sincere without really knowing where all that would take me !
To make an image, I am starting from a previous idea, imagining or viewing the final result, the image gets constructed, little by little, like a sculpture, along the many shootings, until achieving an image that is « speaking » to me, that looks inhabited and that, most of the time, seems to be rather far from the starting idea. The final result is a mixture of intent and of unexpected !
On a technical point of view, I am using natural light coming from a window as a luminous main source, to which I sometimes add a secondary light with a deported flash, adjusted at a very low power. Since the model and the photographer are the same. I am using a remote control with a self-timer.
Then, is starting the post-processing phase through the choice of the best snapshot or snapshots, then through a black and white Photoshop conversion, comes the processing of the background to make it even more neutral, and of the character, globally or locally at the level of densities, contrasts, black and white levels etc... but without any other modification !
Then, in the final phase, addition of textures and of shading.
What is interesting me in that series is the image the body can give by the association of a certain posture with some sort of photographic staging ; the result is sometimes unexpected, amazing, even disturbing, but it is as if the body had a language that is slipping from our grasp ; what interests me as well is to create a link with the viewer and why not, share an emotion !
In one word, it is a fascinating trip and I have a feeling that there is still a lot to discover.
Arles - Espace Van Gogh - RdC Ouest - place Wilson
Kris Séraphin-Lange (France)
"Hamra-Vermillon"
You need to bear a chaos within yourself to give birth to a dancing star.
F.Nietzsche
Everything is red.Everything is red with white stripes sometimes. Lights.And black is just the reverse of red or the opposite of white.
In a duality, where the burst world is just one entity, where the others find their place, where photography finds a meaning.
The expression of shadows and Lights, of the blurriness and sharpness of our guidelines, of the density of our emotions, of the truth of our passions.
Photography, a link.The artist's gift to the surrounding world.
A silent call.
A deep airflow.
A magic breath.
Dominique Charlet.
Hervé Parain (France)
"Surfaces sensibles" (Sensitive Surfaces)
When one is looking for an analogy for « to lay bare » one finds : « to make a surface accessible from the outside ». It is exactly what it is all about here, the photographic picture linking exteriority with the sensitive surface.
To lay bare : not the nude image of the self that one hangs up, but what it generates.
If a model is able to pose nude without revealing herself/himself, it is quite different when one accepts to show at the same time a nude photo of oneself, one's present image and a part of one's intimate universe.
Look at what I was, look at what I am, look at the energy of that moment, look at the story I am telling, look at what I am saying with my body, this is what these characters tell us, one after the other, they are sometimes photographed with a more than thirty years' period between today's picture and the picture they hold.
Each image traces back a personal story and a renewed trust.
Auto portraits Expo
"Auto portraits"
- Aline Héau
- Sophie Boss
- liloo kate
- Magdalena Satanneck
- Estelle Scalabrino
- Sadie Von Paris
- Tingting Sung
- Clementine Salles
Jean-Christophe Laurent (France)
"La Fille de l'Arrêt de Bus" (The Girl at the Bus Stop)
This is about the theatralisation of the banality of urban everyday life where the group gets constituted in a random process : bus stops, railway or underground station platforms, church esplanades, cinema, museum or touristic highlights entrances, street shows, bank money tellers, parking ticket machines, supermarket checkouts, ambulant food vending, coin-operated laundries, petrol filling-station shops, school ending, corporate lifts, etc.
A recurrent "transgressive" element (a nude young woman), comes to disturb the apparent banality of each scene. Apparent only because like the tree that hides the forest, the nude (sometimes) hides other more subtle "abnormalities" (ironical metaphors of human malfunctions) but which cause a second approach attention.
The picture organization refers to the Middle-Ages iconographic criteria (close to its naive character of the world representation), it sounds at the same time "real" and false, like most of the paintings of the time
.
In such a paradigm, the nude young woman symbolizes first of all the Being, presence, "I am" as opposed to "I do" and "I have"... Presence also, within the meaning of current, of the current moment, of the "here and now" in the heart of impermanence. In such a fragment of space and time where the humain being is never standing, the Being is nude, an « archetypal » nakedness free from the poses of seduction and from the codes of charm imagery... There isn't really an actual age. Achieved and unachieved, adult and child at the same time, it still evokes the providential unexpected, "the invisible friend" (the angel), the essence of things (the feminine principle) or the world, according to everyone's point of view or approach...
Arles - Espace Van Gogh - RdC Sud - place Wilson
Idan Wizen (France)
"Un Anonyme Nu Dans Le Salon" (A Nude Anonymous in the Sitting Room)
A Nude Anonymous in the Sitting Room is a photography project initiated in 2009 by Idan Wizen.
Through such a concept, the photographer wishes to change the looks over the bodies, to change the feeling towards nudity in society and to propose a thought about the attraction towards an unknown person.
The models are everyday persons, volunteers, who have accepted to stand nude for the project. A total absence of casting is the project requirement, since the photographer has the feeling that each body, each being, may become a work of art and thus, is to be included in his work. Such an absence of casting enables us to see different bodies, true bodies, bodies offering an alternative beauty to the stereotypes imposed on us in our daily lives.
A photo session in a studio results from a model's application. After the session, only one photo is kept. Then, this photo will be published and sold on the site and on the exhibition place, in the form of a few artistic prints. The models will remain anonymous in order to let everyone's imagination escape and invent the model's age, name or profession… Next, everyone can buy the photographs to hang them in their sitting-room…
The photographer is working with series of one hundred photographies, composed of 50 men and 50 women. The fisrt series is entitled « Genesis ». It was shot on a black background and gave birth to black and white snapshots tinted with red . The second series is clear and definitely less discreet, « Perseverance » proposed a photograph on a red background. The 3rd series, « Obstination » proposes to the models to play, on a grey background, with a Louis XIVth style magenta armchair.
Today, the project is going on and expands more and more. New models are to be regularly discovered on the website and everyone is free to participate, thus becoming a model as well as a collector.
Gérard Panséri (France)
"Vu à la Chambre" (Seen at the Chamber)
« Faux artiste (Fake artist), faux peintre (fake painter), fauxtographe (faketographer) »
A nice formula, attributed to Degas (Renoir or another one) but always aimed at Nadar. How many times have I seen in the look of art buyers, that feeling when I presented my work ! Let's take things in the right order ; true or false is not the artist's, the painter's or the « tographer's » essential problem. The artist's and photographer's status is acquired when we are recognized as such, so, I am letting Willy Ronis speak.
Photographying nude, is a risky adventure and more than one who tries it, achieves a clumsy pastiche, shifting towards vulgarity or the lack of taste.
From the nudes that Gérard Panséri is presenting to our look, there comes out a harmony without any false note, an admiration for the model based on a respectful approach, a mastery of light undoubtedly captured when definitely learning from the great painters from the past.
No easy effects, no touches from the new fashion, a very gentle eroticism.
Gérard makes us sing within ourselves a subtle music, the timelessness of which grarantees a permanent pleasure.
Willy Ronis
« Le dessin n'est pas la forme, il est la manière de voir la forme (Drawing is not the shape, it is a way to see it) » (Degas)
I am interested in finding the drawing again in the structure of the body I am photographing. The work of light, of the passing of colour and of research for abstraction through the positionning of blurs together with the rendering of some parts of the body give a pictorial aspect ; but it remains photography, traditionally made, that may seem outdated for some people !
If it is necessary to add a qualitative criterion to my work, I would say « neo-outdated».
PANSERI
Arles - Espace Van Gogh - 1er étage - place Wilson
Eugéne Louis (France)
The «16 BOYS» series and the BUONARROTI Code
My work is a re-appropriation of the image of the nude, which has become a real and essential product in our consumer society.
In the "16 BOYS" Series, the main idea was to transform Michael-Angelo's frescoes, in the Sixtine Chapel, into a kind of publicity posters campaign (Decaux format) by updating an already incredibly erotic work. It is by my deliberate choice of centering the bodies by representing the Bust , only, that I discovered Michael-Angelo's coded messages : the triangular structure ( a convention in that period ) but applied here to the most emblematic characters and , as a summit, the three components : Hand, Sex, Head.
Through the triangle, the symbolic form of the Divine, Michael-Angelo intends, here, to sanctify and divinize man's body and sex. Through this structure, practically invisible to the naked eye (in observing the work in situ), he quite clearly codifies erotic messages whilst protecting himself ad vitam aeternam from any censorship (the garments added by one D.Da Volterra , in no way modifying the pose).
The Dripping technique in the structure, and the utilization of the golden number in the composition seemed to me essential in order to re-codify the message.
Considered to be scandalous during Michael-Angelo's lifetime, after his death, the frescoes were threatened with destruction (accused of being "obscene") and frequently censured. In 1985, Pope John-Paul II officially put an end to the dispute by requesting that the work be accepted as "the sanctuary of the theology of the human body".
Thierry EUGENE LOUIS
Pascale Lander (France)
"Corps & Canevas" (Body & Canvas)
In her last series of works, Pascale Lander abolishes the distance between painting and photography. Corps & Canevas (Body & Canvas) merges the borders between both subjects.
The series of photographs is first and foremost, the record of a performance in which the artist moves her gestures from the canvas surface to the model's skin. Pascale Lander is literally "painting" her models. She covers them with picture traces and signs before launching a shooting session.
The resulting pictures are fascinating because they tell without our being aware of it, the story of antique figures, enshrined in us, but the memory of which we lost long ago..
The bodies made-up with paint seem to be there to revive an immemorial time when cosmetics was not an ornamental and gratuitous act, subject to the whims of fashion, but a sacred practice with which men adorned their body with signs and symbols, the image of the sky.
Paint level with the surface on the skin of the models and exalted in the photographical picture does not tell us about the being's surface, it expresses its depth..
Jean-Claude Monnier
Sylvia Devos (France)
"Nude"
It is through relaxation, that this kind of artistic expression occured to me. Today, beyond the plain activity, practised like a hobby, collage has become a necessity for me, like a second nature, an identity.
Collage is the offspring of the marriage between matter and emotion. The encounter of elements staged by the collagist, the diversion the reuse of pictures, of texts, of natural matters make collage the art of recovery and of renewal.
Whenever I start a collage, I am inspired by the very first image to draw my attention, the one I chose and that will be my guide. Chance discoveries, the choice of colours, the balance of composition are as many ingredients which will sometimes take me to the result surprise.
A theatre with a new scenery is offered to the gaze of the visitor who extends and individualizes each one of these creations. The different techniques used will make it possible to give an atmosphere to the work. Denaturing the paper through soaking and ageing is a constant for the collagist eager to soften the raw aspect of collage or to unite the images with painting.
All along exhibitions and workshop tasks l was inspired to approach different subjects such as the Middle-Ages, Nature, Emotions, the Self.
Today, the Body and the Nude in all its natural, shocking, provocating aspects, dressed in silk, sensual or unveiled. The subject matter is huge and has not been exhausted so far, still present for me.
« You can't draw, you can't paint but you are a painter…Picasso to Prévert about the latter's collages. »
Charlotte Piérot (France)
"Y mettre sa peau"
"Charlotte Piérot is staging herself. Her body is entering the track.
Faces with an intense look appealing to us – wet hair like just coming out of the sea - or ELIDED, PULLED OUT, REBUILT through shearing. One sees now hands clinging where a gap opened. These hands often cling to the skull, like to some sort of Golgotha.
A passion ? We believe we see a crown of thorns in the piercing nails. The Word made flesh leaves room for the cry. PAIN ? ENJOYMENT ?
That recurring bed, with its creased, vague sheets, from which a foot, bottoms, hair are breaking loose. Stranded or floating body pieces. There is gentleness. Never the body in its entirety. Never sex.
And now, the bed has disappeared, the nude body is there, head down, as if in weightlessness or immersed in transparent water. A strange mermaid. But the body is pierced through by a needle, a deadly needle maybe, no blood is coming out of it though.
Charlotte Piérot photographies herself and then acts upon the picture, makes it come out of its frame.
One gets the feeling of an exorcism. Her works are bearing the trace of such a secret action.
She also readjusts them. Windows, loopholes, through which the body is appearing.
Sometimes cut-off, like behind a blind. Young, white and smooth.
There is gentleness, as I have already mentionned it, no blood nor any other humours , never sex. Where is it floating ?"
E.Houzé
Arles - Chapelle Sainte-Anne - place de la République
Marc Dubord (France)
"Anonymus Hôtel"
These images stand like a wink of an eye to anonymous nude pictures, exchanged under the counter during the brothel years and which more or less influenced and constituted today's sexuality.
Without our being aware of it, society accepted, through our grand-parents' commitment to violate the taboo, a sexuality which is much more free today.
Our children do not necessarily realize that former struggle…
This series of images is just an attempt to make a small blink of the eye in order to be aware of such gone by facts.
This series will be the subject of a book with Debien
Frédéric Bourcier (France)
"Morceaux Choisis " (Selected pieces)
Morceaux choisis, by Frédéric Bourcier, is an exhibition in the form of play: a succession of tableaux or freeze frames in which the scalpel refracts the neon, which itself throws a new light on a bestial sensuality.
Like a picture novel, the staging of these photographs takes us closer to the characters while enticing us to question our own fantasies.
Sidonie is the tripe butcher's wife. His name is Riton. She is devoted to him and even more so to his calf heads and other offal, a passion too beastly….
She willingly cheats on her husband in the cold chamber, which is lit like an autopsy room. Here, she gives herself to his transfixed calves, her select cuts: blanched trotters, split heads, exposed guts, bulging eyes, dislocated jaws…she's into TRIPE-TEASE: tantalizing her adoring, stunned and gaping calves. She ravenously rolls around in the entrails, draping her lovers' flesh over herself…
Sidonie plays. Sidonie strips. Sidonie flirts. Sidonie quivers. Sidonie cuts to the quick.
Le Turk (France)
"Salbatar Circus"
We have left fire and blood behind us and have walked through history. There is only one signpost left on our road now, an old wooden rotten roadsign showing the way to Nowhere.
Fire, blood... And then feast and fun. We've walked through damn all, you and I, we've only met through this text in front of which you're standing with a yearning sigh.
Stranger, I know nothing about you. We share a common night, though, in the midst of this great day. If you remember well, there were a couple of crazy guys off their nuts singing and dancing around a fire in the midst of that night. I remember you getting warm in the warmth of their dancing madness. We still have that dance in our footsteps, and I that song in my head, like a haunting melody still resonant at the bottom of the world, like the never silent voices of the Dead.
Stranger, sit yourself down and if I still have a little breath left after those cigarettes, I'll have the embers of our meager woodfire glow again. This mass for the dead, mass for the last living souls and last moments of life are all for you.
Stranger, take a look and let yourself be entertained. Listen to me and enjoy facing the daunting tucks and pleats of my elephantine women, or meeting here and there my dejected rejects and outstanding outcasts, my precious prostitutes and scarlet harlots. My pathetic jugglers, disenchanted angels, senile old brats, potbellied acrobats, my obsessed lying wicked maniacs. Get acquainted with my gambling games that never win, my merry-go-rounds that will bore the hell out of you, my motorways that will drive you into empty space, my halls of shame and swindle, my bullshit awards, my leasure and holiday time...
If you have time on your hands, why not pay me a visit? Drop in, it's on your way. The name is Salbatar, the place "Salbatar Circus". We'll have a couple of drinks, maybe more, and when you're on your way again, don't worry, you can't miss it : walk straight on to Nowhere.
Arles - Galerie de l’Hôtel du Musée - rue Du Grand Prieuré
Sergio Veranes (France)
"Essences"
This is a selection of photos in time, a short flashback running from the 2000s up to now.
My research is still the same. I want to share with women a moment of intimacy and complicity, in order to immortalize a sublimated instant. Each woman gets incarnated and unveils herself through her prism...
I am proposing an area where she may express her very essence, so that I can capture a spark in her soul. We are weaving a trust and communication ring that can materialize through words or not but where the exchange is present, active, evolving.
I am not trying to establish any concept. A nude body is loaded with more or less subtle energies, of its own... We are engaging, my muse and I, in a game of creation, concocting a dish the recipe of which you formulate as you move along ...
A discovery trip, the adventure of the senses and of the psyche...
Arles - Galerie de l’Hôtel del'Amphithéâtre - rue du Diderot
Benoist Demoriane (France)
"Apparitions"
Just when I am deciding to photography my model, when the mirror switches and shuts the viewfinder, she disappears, becomes invisible, a wandering ghost without a body, in a blind and black silence...
A transfiguration takes place then, from a model to a figure. Like Eurydice coming up from the depth of the blind shadow, towards light, towards the recovered sight, like coming from the depths of the developing bath, the desired picture appears slowly from the figure then melted in that invisible substance, on which it is founded and which fertilizes it.
It appears photographied, a ghostly, moulting picture, bathed with shining forms, shadows of doubles, in an echo return, echo-graphied, in an incorporeal and transparent apparition…
In such unexpected sights, our imagination wakes up, free and fruitful, in the motion of figures in the making, in the constant mobility of their development…
Suspended time… suspense... silence… truce in duration… in our human condition, in our destiny… Truce for time of peace and freedom… for all that is felt but can't be seen…
One sixth of second ? A tiny, very tiny bit of time, but experienced like a present of eternity, free from life motion…
Benoist Demoriane
Arles - Galerie Huit - rue de la Calade
Martial Lenoir (France)
"La loge des Rats" (The Rat Lodge)
Paris, at the beginning of the Roaring Twenties, when this burlesque cabaret meets a growing success on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Joan Warner, an American star of stripping is arrested on the stage of the Folies Bergère, because of the complaint from a spectator who had seen a « tip of her naked bottom ».
It's the moment Martial Lenoir, a former motorcycle racer, choses to start Le Grand Jeu, an underground cabaret, where, under the pretext of artistic prowesses, more and more naked girls, are dancing in a unique setting.
The petty bourgeoisie is rushing, the champagne flows freely, on the stage, strass jewels and flakes…but the other side of the stage is quite different.
Welcome in « La Loge Des Rats (the Rat Lodge) »
Les Baux de Provence - Salles de Manville - Hôtel de Manville
Uma Kinoshita (Japon)
"Cinema – Japon"
Love is a theme that always attracts me. Among various forms of love, I focused in this series on love between a man and a woman and tried to tell a Japanese love story. I set the time background in a little older period, for freedom of love was more restricted in those days, for women in particular.
With this backdrop, I tried to describe a woman who pursued true love and struggled between the society's severe moral suppression and her free-will abandon. The tragic ending is that the couple commit suicide together.
This may also reflect a part of the Japanese sense for love and death. This pattern of conclusion was once even adored in Japan, after Chikamatsu Monzaemon adopted this epilogue in his puppet show (a Japanese cultural heritage called Ningyo Joruri). In fact, not a few couples followed suit, for they thought there was no other way to keep their socially forbidden, but true love intact.
Although this act may seem insane, when I imagine how they reached the final determination, the passion is still fascinating to me. Compared from those days, people have changed a lot together with time, as the traditional items I included in these pictures are also quickly disappearing in today's society. But love always exists somewhere between reality and illusion. I hope there might be something in these photographs that can be shared with people of this age.
In this festival, I am exhibiting some of the best scenes of the drama. If you would like to see the whole series, please feel free to ask me or visit my website.
Yannick Verdier Monségur (France)
"Urban Yin Yang"
Through black and white photographs and diptychs, Yannick Verdier Monsegur transports
us to the core of China, France and Japan. This insight into the atmosphere of Shanghai,
Paris and Tokyo encourages us to build-up bridges between Asia and the West.
Each photograph depicts a duality between light and shadow, black and white, that shows
the two-faces vision of the Photographer and his model : creation and emotion, aesthetics
and symbol.
The models pose in turn as yin and yang, woman and man, one reflecting the other,
one being reflected in the other, the whole set striking a balance. "Urban Yin Yang, in
Shanghai, Paris and Tokyo" is a visualization of the spirit of these cities, thanks to the
models coming directly from those cities. Thereby creating a strong and an original work.
Les Baux de Provence - La Citerne - place de l’Eglise / Ilot Post Tenebras Lux - Grand rue
Lucien Lorelle (France)
"Nu"
Born in 1894, Lucien Lorelle, had never bothered about a certain Nicéphore Niepce !
A careless youth but who already paid attention to pictorial art. In 1914, he joined the army as an infantryman, he was wounded and decorated, ended the war as a fighter pilot on board of the famous Spads.
Back to civilian life, still passionate for literature and painting that he practised (without any commercial success), he was enrolled as a secretary at the Frères Manuels, fashionable and yet traditional photographers.
Thanks to his meetings with the surrealist artists, Breton, Buňuel with whom he worked and created the Studio 28 poster where « An Andalusian dog (Un Chien Andalou) » was played, he turned to photography.
The great adventure began… inspired from the lighting of a cinema studio, he adjusted the new technique to photographic shooting. That's how he made some 10,000 snapshots of « people», actors like : Annabella, Michel Simon, Jean Renoir, Jean Cocteau, Micheline Presle, Gérard Philipe, Martine Carol and many others, while giving up the former technique of portrait, thus inspiring, for instance, Harcourt studio.
Tired with portraits he went on with his research, Lucien Lorelle would essentially try to show unknown worlds among which the female body is the main subject.
He also carried out advertising research, thus becoming the inventor of advertising photography with still famous pioneering as well as inventive creations such as Miss Ambre Solaire, Citroën, Perrier, the Galeries Lafayette, Pernod, the book campaign with Gérard Philippe, Winston cigarettes, even inventing characters… an innovation for the period.
Thanks to advertising, he carried on with his research, solarization, cutouts, superimposition, with quite often the female body as a model. At the same time, he went on painting and writing his first photographic guidebooks.
In 1946, with André Garban, he founded the Groupe des XV (Group of the XV) then the National exhibition of Photography (salon National de la photographie).
At the same time, he defended photographic art and discussed on it through lectures and articles. Then, he went on with the writing of the photographic guidebooks and varied publications on nude, staging, light technique.
As a precursor of colour, Lucien Lorelle created in 1952 the Central Color laboratory, the management of which he entrusted to his daughter, Françoise Gallois, whose successor today is his great grandson, Jean François.
As the virus of painting was still alive, Lucien Lorelle kept drawing and painting, while giving his full knowledge to the drafting of a photography course, the result of a 10 years work.
He died in 1968, leaving the image of a hard-working and thousand-facetted man, an image poet, a talent popularizer, an art addict, a woman lover, the precursor of a new art : modern photography.
Such multiple talents enabled Mr Chaban Delmas to state : « It's thanks to your talent that an English princess could marry a photographer ».
A beautiful conclusion !
Philippe Gallois.
Les Baux de Provence - Galerie de la Cure - place de l’Eglise
Giuseppe de Leo (Italie)
"Sensualité hors du temps" (A timeless sensuality)
The pictures that I am proposing to you are divided up into two period sections.
The first one relates to the use of a traditional camera, the second one is reflecting the new trend of digital photography.
I would like to talk about the emotions I felt when I shot such pictures, but each one of you will have his/her own reaction, dictated by sensitiveness and excitation.
The look , the hair, the movements of the body, nudity, how can one resist, how not to look and imagine.
Varied, compromising and intriguing situations, a quest for sensuality.
The whole is recorded by a photography shot with a former or modern camera, it doesn't matter.
Have a nice show
