2023-07-04 20:40:27
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Posted on 07/01/2023 17:18 Updated on 07/04/2023 20:40
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The loneliness of old age, the smiles of exiles or joyful sobriety. In 500 pages and more than 300 photographs, “Le Bal des Rejetons” brings together the series of 30 photographers like so many stories of a France far from the spotlight of the news. The book will be presented in Arles, the world capital of photography in July. In images, in pictures.
It is written in the foreword of the book: “This book should never have existed”. At its origin, the decision of a collective not to drop 30 photographers who failed in a competition for an exceptional call for projects from the Ministry of Culture. They had not been retained. Discarded, failed as for the exams, not taken, not chosen… So they joined forces and with The Offspring Ballthey recount a France of today. In July editions.
“The Fifth Age” is the title of Laetitia D’Aboville’s series. In EHPAPs, the Covid period was dramatic. In two establishments in Pantin and Marseille, she photographed Alzheimer’s patients for whom “their planet is changing every minute”. She captured this strange loneliness, the gaze lost on a horizon and a world that is only theirs. She recounts this “universe apart, which society often refuses to see”. (LAETITIA D’ABOVILLE) August 15, 2021 will be an indelible date for these Afghans. The capture of Kabul by the Taliban led to their exile. Frédérique Lebrun photographed this diaspora, a term that says dispersion across the world. For them, exile meant “losing everything”. These images, collected under the title “After the fall” tell this destitution, but a burst of laughter in front of the sea lets imagine a better future on a new land. (FREDERIQUE LE BRUN) His eyes are on the ground, a mixture of fatigue and modesty. It is a young man that Samy Ait Chikh in “Marseille-Dublin” photographed in Marseille. He is one of the 7,000 asylum seekers in France who are waiting for an answer. He is a young man stranded on the shores of the Mediterranean waiting for a status. The series tells “from the exodus to the asylum”. The sun of Marseille illuminates their looks filled with hope. All dream of a possible future in Europe. (SAMY AIT CHIKH) “Live my life!” is a documentary series by Patricia Lecomte on the life of a young adult with a mental disability or autism. They are between 30 and 35 years old. They live in a studio in a hostel, in an independent apartment or in a shared apartment. A tender and intimate gaze. A photographer who looks at these young people as she would have looked at all young people. (PATRICIA LECOMTE) The “Bal des Rejectons” collective could not miss the effects of climate change. Valentine Zeller with these dark, disturbing and torch-burned prints delves into everyone’s “inner landscapes”. She says it: “It’s no longer to warn but to change our relationship to the world and imagine that of tomorrow!” (VALENTINE ZELER) “Live on little but as she sees fit…” This is Agathe’s creed that Nathalie Baetens tells us in 13 tender and delicate photographs. A radical but happy life choice. Her car is therefore her home and Agathe declares: “There is in me a desire for itinerancy, nomadism, freedom. To have a very small house, but a huge garden which changes every day”. (NATHALIE BAETENS) Karoll Petit from the Hans Lucas agency is an agricultural photographer. But we should rather write, Karoll is the photographer of women who work the land. For “Les champs des femmes”, she captures these women farmers who are strongly attached to their crops and their animals. This series finally gives a face to “all these women farmers, peasants, women of the land who are proud of what they produce, proud to feed people” and are so often “invibilized”. (KAROLL PETIT / HANS LUCAS) A teenager in a beekeeper’s outfit wears a smile and the light reflects the start of summer. Soon the holidays except for these young people. Anthony Micallef started from a simple observation, the school is little imaged. Yet 3.5 million young people spend such a long part of their years there. And the clichés about adolescence and the suburbs are tenacious. 600 teenagers study at Collège Jacques-Prévert and in these images, in their looks, their attitudes, there is as much worry as hope, as much dream as laughter. (ANTHONY MICALLEF/HAYTHAM-REA / HAYTHAM PICTURES) The large complexes of Pissevin and Valdegour were built to accommodate 45,000 people in the 1960s. These are areas that have been said to be priorities for decades. Anonymous and distant building bars. Estelle Pereira went to meet those who live there. Because these buildings dedicated to destruction, to rehabilitation are inhabited. There are wild gardens, sunny balconies, revolts and giggles. This series tells the life of millions of French people, “their home”. (ESTELLE PEREIRA ) It’s another “home”. They live at the foot of the Cattenom nuclear power plant in Moselle. Their landscape: these 4 air-cooling towers of 165 m, and their plume of water vapour. Nikos Djail imposed this disturbing and omnipresent decor in his 11 portraits. “But the locals don’t pay attention to it. Some even like the atomic skyline that emerges at the end of a field or a forest.”. The series is called with humor: “Atom crochu”! (NIKOSDJAIL) “For them and them, hiking is a therapeutic tool. There is no way to remain static, otherwise the physical and mental balance is threatened.” Florent Pommier will say no more about the reasons that push these women and men to walk. But everyone has this motto “Walking heals”. Far from violence, far from cancer, far from a ruined childhood. And the trees, the thickets accompany these portraits. A breath and a poetic title “Empty your bag” (FLORENT POMMIER)
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