A PHOTOGRAPHY ENCOUNTER IN VICHY FROM 16 JUNE Kit Portra… · Strömholm, Catherine Balet, Pierre Gonnord, Claudia Imbert and Modds agency portraitists. Portrait(s) is delighted

Y E A R

N°5

A PHOTOGRAPHYENCOUNTERIN VICHY

FROM 16 JUNE TO 10 SEPTEMBER 2017

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Björk. ©

Benni Valsson. Courtesy agence Modds

Portrait(s) Fifth Year

A word of praise by Claude MalhuretThe Mayor of Vichy and Senator of the Allier Department

Portrait(s) Festival is celebrating its fifth anniversary this year with an exhibition thatis true to its founding principles, both bold and vernacular.Portrait(s) is first and foremost a celebration of photography through the prism of agenre that has fed the history of art: the portrait in all its forms, be it documentary,historical or simply staged, the portrait as the “direct imprint of the lived upon time”as writer René Huyghe put it, the portrait as a purely aesthetic enterpriseor as a way of expressing an individual vision of the world.Portrait(s) is also – perhaps most of all – a popular festival; an opportunity to stagedeliberate or chance encounters between the works on display around the town andthe people who live there, the framework of whose lives suddenly changes; and adiscreet way of putting the urban environment and our daily lives into perspective. Over the five years of its existence, Portrait(s)has already achieved its goal, puttingin plain sight on the streets prints by famous and celebrated photographers like Jean-Loup Sieff, Elliott Erwitt and Jean-Marie Périer, and drawing young talents into thepublic gaze. Special mention also should be made of the five artists in residence whoby taking his or her own portrait of Vichy have demonstrated the inexhaustiblerichness of the genre.I should like to offer my sincere thanks to all who have given life to this Festival, tothe organizers - artistic director Fany Dupêchez and exhibition director KarimBoulhaya; the artists, all of whom joined in the game right from the start; and lastbut not least the public, so many and so faithful, because it is for them and throughthem that this coming together, by now part of the canon, exists.

Portrait(s)Festival… Many Happy Returns!

Fany DupêchezArtistic Director

Welcome to Vichy and to Portrait(s) edition 5, which is being held from 16 June to 10September. Once again, the Festival will fill the galleries at the Centre Culturel Valery-Larbaud, and the city squares and promenades, for a summer devoted to portraitphotography.Five years… that’s already an anniversary, a special moment for the Festival, a highpoint in the story of an encounter between an artistic discipline and a city in the AllierDepartment that started back in 2013. It’s a path that creates bonds of confidencebetween the city and the artists, and that highlights the commitment of the teamswho stage this event.Five years… also our pride of having exhibited the work of over fifty photographers,at the previous four years of the Festival, and of having achieved, during these veryhard times for culture, a success that now enables this, our fifth festival, to see thelight of day and its organizers to pursue their exploration of the infinitely variableworld of the portrait as well as their defence of creative work.Portrait(s) has a very demanding programme. By hosting internationally renownedartists and emerging talents, creative imagination and social realism, contemporarywork and historical records, it examines the complexity of an art that has a longtradition while at the same time plays with its rules all the better to improve them.Shooting a portrait involves placing one’s artistic subjectivity at the service of thesubject, be it the face of an unknown person or a public figure. It means exploring anintimate geography in order to propose a reading that is both unique and sensitive,revealing the traces of a personal story or the lines of a collective destiny in the eyesthat gaze back from the image, the gesture made by the subject’s body. It is also andabove all an invitation to the public, be they experts or amateurs, to face the otherand to come to an understanding of the world through the photographers’ vision.This year, the Festival continues its support of photographic creation and celebratesthe fourth period of residency offered to a contemporary artist. This year it has beenPortuguese photographer Sandra Rocha, whose fluid, poetic exploration of Vichy’sriverbanks and gardens is the subject of an open-air exhibition in the city. And theFestival has organized a new learning initiative, Vichy invites itself to school, wherecreative workshops have enabled young people to discover the bases of photography.

I should like to offer my warmest thanks to the City Council, to Mayor Claude Malhuret,to Madame Charlotte Benoît and Dominique Lagrange for their commitment to andsupport of the Festival, and especially to Karim and the CCVL team, and Pascal.

We’ll be getting together on 16 June to introduce you to the programme of Portrait(s)edition 5.

Portrait(s) presents ten exhibitions, being held simultaneously in the city centre andin the open. The galleries of the Centre Culturel Valery-Larbaud, which was built atthe beginning of the last century, will feature work by Stephen Shames, ChristerStrömholm, Catherine Balet, Pierre Gonnord, Claudia Imbert and Modds agencyportraitists.

Portrait(s) is delighted to present Chinese photographer Liu Bolin’s first open-airretrospective, on the Lac d’Allier esplanade. Here passers-by can see some sixtyphotographs by this invisible man who uses his body as a means to blend intobackgrounds he chooses – supermarket shelves, the door to a safe, piles of coal,newspaper stand displays… This star on the Chinese scene creates stunning photoperformances.

Inside the galleries - Centre Culturel Valery-LarbaudA faithful chronicler of the Black Panther Party, the great movement for theemancipation of African-Americans during the 1970s, Stephen Shames spentseven years with them, tracing in his images their struggle and the hopes of apeople on the march. Following in the great tradition of committed photographyin the United States, his reportage gives off a strong, brotherly energy.

In Paris back in the 1950s, Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm createdstunning work on the trans-sexual community on Place Blanche. Sharing theireveryday lives with them, as the days and months went by he invented a new form ofreportage combining the poetic with the documentary.

Group show by French portrait photography agency Modds : it presents the work offifteen or so highly individual artists, some of whom have virtually taken over someof the most prestigious magazines in the world. Each of these photographers has hisor her own personality, his or her own technique, enabling them to get to that magicalspace with a totally unknown star in under five minutes, the time limit within whichthey have to define and state their individual writing style.

Basing her approach on the chameleon-like talent of costume designer RicardoMartinez Paz, French photographer Catherine Balet does homage to iconic imageslike Robert Doisneau’s Kiss by the Hotel de Ville and Andy Warhol’s Self-Portrait inDrag. Revisiting images that are familiar to us while injecting emotion into herinterpretations, she calls on our memory and our ability to distance ourselves.

Pierre Gonnord here reveals portraits of young, very young people whose eyes havea sense of gravity, and whose faces, despite their youth, are charged with a silent yetvital force that the photographer pays almost religious homage to, linking them withthe chiaroscuro in works by Caravaggio, Oscar Murillo or José de Ribera.

French photographer Claudia Imbert was offered a residency on the GaspéPeninsula, in Quebec, where she took portraits of the inhabitants of a small villagecalled Petite-Vallée. Carefully choosing her settings and posing her subjectstheatrically, she creates a reflection on the way we inhabit spaces.

On the Place Saint-Blaise are exhibited dreamlike, bucolic images created by SandraRocha, a young Portuguese photographer, during her residency. By setting this watercity against a rustic background, she immortalizes the endless summer of the youngfolks of Vichy gathering the roses of life by the edge of the Allier.

As part of a partnership with SNCF’s Gares & Connexions programme, Portrait(s)Festival will stage a presentation of pictures from its fifth festival at Vichy and ParisBercy Stations.

PROGRAMME SELECTION BY :

FANY DUPÉCHEZ, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

KARIM BOULHAYA, DIRECTOR CENTRE CULTUREL VALERY-LARBAUD & CO-CURATOR

PASCAL MICHAUT,

CHARLOTTE BENOIT, ASSISTANT TO THE MAYOR, CULTURAL AFFAIRS OFFICER

PORTRAIT(S) — YEAR N°5

In 1956, Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm, then aged thirty-eight,dropped his bags off at a scruffy hotel on the Place Blanche in Paris, wherethe clientele was basically made up of transsexuals. Adopting the nightlifeof his fellow guests, he managed to share their intimate moments, comingto photograph their kisses, the radiant light of their faces, the slendersootiness of their false eyebrows, their weary bodies in the small hours. Overa period of months, Strömholm produced a captivating reportage in whichthe documentary and the lyrical glow side by side.

Carmen © Christer Strömholm/Strömholm Estate Sabrina © Christer Strömholm/Strömholm Estate


The series Looking for the Masters in Ricardo’s Golden Shoes is the product ofa collaborative effort between photographer Catherine Balet and her friend,costume designer Ricardo Martinez Paz, a mime and one-off interpreter withwhom she revisits iconic images from the world of portrait photography, fromCornelius’ first daguerrotype down to the latest trends. At a time when we findourselves drowning in floods of images every day, this series raises questionsabout the development of photographic expression and challenges us to askabout the iconic status of a photograph, even its timelessness. Through theminute detail of her artistic endeavour, combined with Ricardo’s performancegames, the series takes us, the viewers, on a voyage through time, down the 176years of photographic creation, as if on a guided visit around a fantasy museum.

Catherine Balet is represented by the galerie Thierry Bigaignon, Paris.

Hommage à Pierre et Gilles, La tentation d’Adam,1996 © Catherine Balet, 2014. Courtesy galerieThierry Bigaignon

Hommage à Helmut Newton, YSL, French Vogue,rue Aubriot, Paris 1975 © Catherine Balet, 2014.Courtesy galerie Thierry Bigaignon


During the sixties and seventies, Stephen Shames was the faithfulchronicler of the Black Panther Party, the powerful movement for theemancipation of African-Americans that developed radical forms ofopposition. As a faithful fellow traveller for seven years, Stephen Shamesproduced images tracing the daily lives of a people on the march :debates, the distribution of food and clothing, protest demonstrations,confrontations and funerals… After that, he spent twenty yearsdocumenting life in the Bronx. Starting in the 1980s he produced anumber of series on violence, precariousness and jail-like conditions,especially in the world of miners. His photo essays have a fierce yetfraternal energy – consistent with the American tradition of photographiccommitment.

This project by The Red Eye (curators François Cheval and AudreyHoareau) is coproduced with the Musée Nicéphore Niépce at Chalon-sur-Saône and the Maison de la Photographie Robert Doisneau at Gentilly.

1970 - Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Black Panther sells"The Black Panther", the party's newspaper in the Roxburysection of Boston. Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery

1980 - New York, USA. 15-year-old teenager who hustlesin Times Square emerges from the subway with his guntucked in his pants. He uses the gun to rob people.Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery


A master of the art of camouflage, Liu Bolin uses his body to blend– literally – into chosen backgrounds and create stunning photoperformances. For over ten years this invisible man has been using thesame working method. With the help of his assistants, who painthim from head to foot, he vanishes into a supermarket shelf, the door toa safe, a pile of coal, a spread of newspaper stand displays. Thisrare retrospective of his work will enable the public to discover hisspectacular images, which are nothing less than works of resistance. Bybecoming the invisible man who slips in where he is not expected, LiuBolin asserts a stubborn, insubordinate presence in a world that tendsto deny the individuality of each person’s destiny.

Liu Bolin is represented by the Galerie Paris-Beijing, Paris.

Great Wall, série Hiding in the City, 2010 © Liu Bolin. Courtesy galerie Paris-Beijing


Founded in 2011, Modds is a special case in the world of photographyagencies. This atypical team has been formed by two young fighters whoare fierce in defending their artists, fifteen or so highly individual portraitartists, some of whom are making it with the most prestigious magazines,from Vanity Fair to Figaro Madame, from Libération to Inrocks. Each of thephotographers has his or her own personality, his or her own technique,enabling them in under five minutes to get to that magical space with a to-tally unknown star. For long put down under the name of French touch, asophisticated, highly retouched, but for all that smooth American taste,their images are more natural and have made their own name.

Featured: Kate Barry, Jérôme Bonnet, Ludovic Carème, Claudio Carpi,Turkina Faso, Vincent Ferrané, Roberto Frankenberg, Samuel Kirszenbaum,Antoine Le Grand, Vincent Lignier, Olivier Metzger, Yann Rabanier, Jean-François Robert, Paul Rousteau, Denis Rouvre, Patrick Swirc, Benni Valsson,Rudy Waks.

Björk. © Benni Valsson. Courtesy agence Modds Christine and the Queens. © Vincent Ferrané. Courtesyagence Modds


A special light glows from the portraits by Pierre Gonnord. Known forhis series on the damned of the earth – nomadic gypsies, day workers,immigrants, the homeless, miners – here he reveals lesser-known portraitsof young, very young people whose eyes have a sense of gravity, and whosefaces, despite their youth, are charged with a silent yet vital force that thephotographer pays almost religious homage to, linking them with thechiaroscuro in works by Caravaggio, Oscar Murillo or José de Ribera, anddarkening the images the better to allow the light of the soul to expressitself.

Pierre Gonnord is represented by the Galería Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid.

Sophie, 2012 © Pierre Gonnord. Courtesy galerie Juana deAizpuru

Alexander, 2010 © Pierre Gonnord. Courtesy galerie Juanade Aizpuru


Petite-Vallée is a small town on the Gaspé Peninsula, in Quebec, whereClaudia Imbert was offered a residency, during which she produced a seriesof photographs on the ways we have of inhabiting space. In Petite-Vallée,beneath the murky, cloudy skies, the local people take on the appearanceof rock faces, their bodies separate from a landscape devoted to vastness,their looks revealing inner courses only these characters have the key to.There’s nothing psychological in these larger-than-nature portraits. Each ofthe subjects is playing their part as a solo. And each one, by virtue of theirpresence, leaves their mark on the place and brings stature to their image.

Untitled, series Petite-Vallée, 2015 © Claudia Imbert


Untitled, series Banks of bathers adrift, 2016-2017 ©Sandra Rocha

Untitled, series Banks of bathers adrift, 2016-2017 ©Sandra Rocha


Acting on a proposal by Portrait(s) Festival, Jérôme Schirtzinger gave a class of first-year students at Georges Méchin School a two-month workshop, from the beginningof March to the end of April, on how to frame photographs. It marked yet anotheropportunity for creating a tie with Portrait(s) Festival, which by now has becomeVichy’s unmissable encounter with photography.

To bring the workshop to life, Jérôme (aka Cheub) used an imaginary character,Mister Mustache, and in this way got the pupils to discover and analyse the bases ofphotographic framing through creative spreads and drawing sessions.

A local photographer, Christophe Darbelet, then completed the learning process bytaking the school- children out on practical shooting sessions. A selection of thephotographs they made during the workshop will be on exhibition in the City Hall.

The workshop was further facilitated by the efforts of educational consultant SylvieMosnier and Ghislaine Chazot, Principal of Georges Méchin School, as well as the Cityof Vichy and its IT Service, which provided the iPads used by the students.


This year Wipplay is supporting the seventh annual Vichy Portrait(s) contest, whichinvites both professional and amateur photographers to submit a series ofphotographs focusing on the theme of portrait.

A prestigious jury comprising Dimitri Beck (Polka), Geoffroy Dubois (Paris-Beijinggallery), Julie Plus (Wipplay) and Fany Dupêchez (Artistic Director of the Portrait(s)Festival), met a the end of April to decide on the prizewinner in each category.

The jury will award three prizes: - First Jury Prize: an exhibition of the prizewinning series at Portrait(s) 2016 + 1200 € + one book- Second Jury Prize: 500 € + a signed copy of the residence book- Third Jury Prize: a signed copy of the residence book

The first prizewinner will be awarded an exhibition of his/her images in the Valery-Larbaud Médiathèque for the entire duration of the Festival, from 17 June to 9September 2017.

vichymE

The participatory photography project Vichy & me, a new initiative by thefestival, once again supported by Wipplay, invites the people of the city to posta photograph illustrating their daily lives on the Wipplay dedicated site page.The aim of the project is to collect photographs taken by citizens in order tocreate a map and a portrait of their city. An exhibition of the best works isplanned in 2018.

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18.00 :

19.00 :

SATURDAY 17 JUNE :


EXHIBITION ON THE LAC D’ALLIER

ESPLANADE

GALLERIES OF THECENTRE CULTUREL VALERY LARBAUD

EXHIBITION SAINT-LOUIS CHURCH

SQUARE

MULTIMEDIA LIBRARYVALERY-LARBAUD

EXHIBITION, SIGNATURES ANDCONFERENCE

CITY HALL

TRAIN STATION


THE TEAM

FANY DUPECHEZ [email protected]

KARIM BOULHAYA [email protected]

PASCAL MICHAUT [email protected]

MEDIA RELATIONSNATHALIE DRAN COMMUNICATION [email protected] / 00 33 6 99 41 52 49 / 00 33 9 61 30 19 46

GRAPHIC CONCEPTELEMENT-S / JÉRÔME [email protected]

TECHNICAL DIRECTIONJEAN-MICHEL FIORI & JE�RÔ�ME SCHIRTZINGER [email protected] [email protected] / 00 33 4 70 30 55 73

PORTRAIT(S) IS ORGANIZED BY THE CITY OF VICHY AND PROPOSED BY FANY DUPÊCHEZ.

PUBLIC SPONSORS

PARTENAIRES PRIVÉS

MEDIA SPONSORS

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Documents

A PHOTOGRAPHY ENCOUNTER IN VICHY FROM 16 JUNE Kit Portra… · Strömholm, Catherine Balet, Pierre Gonnord, Claudia Imbert and Modds agency portraitists. Portrait(s) is delighted