The destinations of major summer photographic events in the south of France, Arles and Perpignan, such as the unmissable escapades of Sète, Toulouse or La Gacilly, the creators of L’Œil urbain – Lionel Antoni, photographer, and Élisabeth Hébert, artistic director –, know them well for having, for many years, dedicated part of their free time to them. Also, over the course of meetings and discoveries, the desire to create an event linked to photography at home, in Corbeil-Essonnes, became more and more pressing. The bet is daring to establish itself in the Parisian suburbs, far from the established circuits, but the idea, matured for a long time in the heads of these two natives of the city, finally becomes reality in the spring of 2013.
→ CRITICAL. “The lives we lead”, in the footsteps of the French
Gradually, the event settles in the landscape. The quality of the selected photographers and the choice to mix recognized names and promising talents works wonderfully. Since 2013, historic safe bets, Yan Morvan, Patrick Zachmann, Michael Ackerman and Alain Keller have rubbed shoulders with talented younger generations. Cyrus Cornut, Sébastien Van Malleghem, Yohanne Lamoulère or Sandra Mehl, to name only a tiny part of them, follow one another on the festival programme. The sauce takes on, to the point of ensuring, for ten years and without a hitch, a form of identity, and an always balanced selection, where the favourites, according to the organizers, preside over the choices of the photographers exhibited.
A long-term residence
The other strength of this Essonne festival is that a photographer is invited to stay for a year, in order to reproduce a work of his choice dedicated to the territory and the inhabitants of the city. “It’s Jean-Christophe Béchet (himself guest photographer during the first edition) who advised us to organize this residency”, Lionel breathes.
It is enough today to observe the results of past residencies to realize the great successes. In 2015, the work of Richard Pak reveals the atypical and remarkable daily life of the “Brothers alike”, these singular twins, living on the fringes of the city, whom everyone knows in Corbeil-Essonnes without ever having really approached them. Between accumulations of plastic bags, encyclopedic rock culture and striped sweaters from another age, the photographer offers, as close as possible, a tender and funny subject on supposedly different beings.
A few years later, Guillaume Zuili tells a completely different story. Combining techniques, formats and the alchemy of printing, it explores the historic bowels of the city. Large mills, old printing works, urban and industrial fragments are metamorphosed in a ghostly black and white.
Once again this year, the challenge taken up by Sandra Mehl is equal to the best past residencies. Turned towards the intimate, it delivers images of young girls and boys from Corbeil, their territories and places of romantic encounters. The looks, the entwined bodies and the faces tell of a beautiful and lively youth, far from the stereotypical iconography of the suburbs.
Echoes of the news
To top it off, this 2022 edition offers a program of extraordinary density. What a pleasure to find, on the facade of the market, the large black and white formats of the immense William Klein, whose modernity cannot be denied. Guillaume Herbaut’s story, devoted for more than twenty years to Ukraine, from Chernobyl to the current war, resonates, remarkably, with current events.
Darcy Padilla captures the harshness of a life, that of Julie confronted with AIDS. She transcribes her tough journey and that of her family until the end in a projection composed of photos and videos: emotion guaranteed. While Anthony Micallef pays a touching tribute to the displaced persons from the rue d’Aubagne in Marseilles and the photographers of the Item collective, always as precise, engage frankly on social or political issues, the scripted portraits of the inhabitants of the place speak so British Rip Hopkins, adorn the city’s advertising spaces.
Thirteen exhibitions punctuate the tour in the open air and in dedicated places in the city center. So many reasons to visit The Urban Eye in Corbeil-Essonnes.