Like every year, Efet students organize themselves to be in Arles, during the professional Rencontres week. But it doesn’t stop there, some students exhibit and present their personal know-how during this great gathering of Photography.
For this year 2024, I have selected some works which reflect the abilities and skills acquired in this establishment for learning and which present some touches of originality.
In the few dozen images analyzed, I noticed, as last year, an educational return towards technical training which seems more successful. Indeed, the intellectual suppression of the study of technologies in favor of poor creations as unbridled as they are incoherent seems to no longer be relevant. The showing of ethereal, cheap creative virtues is disappearing. Depths of fields, chromatic masses, vanishing lines, optical aberrations, temporal threads, reading compositions, colorimetric acuity, etc., are notions that take up their place in images. At a time when design and binary control are becoming a panacea for all, it is reassuring to teach coming generations the mastery of the tools and the essential place of brain-based creativity in designs.
As for those we call emerging photographers (I suppose to be distinguished from photographers who are damaged), we are finally escaping, certainly very gradually, from the single conception (conformal copy for all). Better technical mastery generates specificity for certain types of images, and the the return of images with personality.
Despite the birds of ill omen, it seems that some young photographers would like to keep the torch lit. Let’s make the effort to see their work and share our knowledge, which is still very modest, on the taming of light.
Thanks to Mélanie Moutarde for her help and collaboration in the preparation of this article.
Thierry Maindrault
Espace Efet
32 rue Docteur Fanton
13200 Arles
open every days from 10:00 am to 08:00 pm,
until July14, 2024.
