This April, Bordeaux will host the 22nd edition of the Festival Itinéraires des Photographes Voyageurs. Sharing the role of artistic director are Nathalie Lamire-Fabre and Vincent Bengold, who have invited sixteen photographers, the majority of them from a younger generation. Scattered across 13 locations throughout the city and its surrounding areas, the exhibitions are there to be discovered at your leisure. This is the occasion for the public to embark on a journey.
From Africa: Christope Héry and Harold Lagaillarde introduce us to the people they encounter during their travels, the former in Nigeria and the latter along the Nationale 7, the Malian route leading from Bamako to Zegoua. Sophie Chausse returns home to Gabon to offer a vision of the country she left twenty years ago, and which today celebrates its forty years of independence. Thibault de Puyfontaine sets out into the Egyptian night to shoot its deserted streets in vibrant colors.
As we leave Africa for Asia, we see Baptiste de Ville d’Avray documentary photographs of Turkey, that country on the border of Asia and Europe. Further east, we see Pascal Ken’s colorful pictures of the famous Japanese capital during his short stays in the city.
Back in Europe we discover a group project on Ceuta a spanish town in northern Morocco. The photography collective Du Grain à Moudre (Cédric Friggeri, Arno Brignon, Julien Pebrel and David Ameye) investigates frontier cities in this new series.
Catherine Corvec shows us the Romanian people in her black-and-white series Dor (the Romanian word for “nostalgia”). Cyrus Cornut and Kristine Thiemann train their lenses on France. Cornut focuses on urban landscapes in the French suburbs, which he labels “no-go zones”, while Thiemann produced a series of photographs last June that stages the visions and ideas of Bordeaux citizens to transform and “dream the future” of the Benauge district.
More than just a geographical journey, the event will let viewers feel the atmospheres, the singular worlds of the different works on display, like those of Julien Lombardi and Jean-Luc Aribaud, chroniclers of nocturnal urban environments, wherever they may be… Damien Guillaume presents his “still lifes” by collecting images devoid of human presence. The photographer captures the silence of places and the details of daily life through the traces and objects that evoke the presence of humanity.
A few photographers invite us to the heart of their world: Guillaume Amat manipulates us, playing with our visual perception, plunging us into confusion, between reality and fiction, whereas François Jonquet shares his “travel moments”: a collection of everyday images, those small moments he captures during his travels.
Finally, the Institut Cervantes presents an exhibition entitled Irrealidades, the result of a photography project by three Spanish artists (Cristina de Middel, Javier Arcenillas and Marga Garrido), based on a common axis of deconstruction and construction of a reality inspired by documentary objects.
Itinéraires des Photographes Voyageurs
April 1 – 29, 2012
45 cours du Médoc
33300 Bordeaux
