This week, The Eye of Photography offers a focus on the Bourse du Talent and its exhibition at the National Library of France in Paris. Today, Héloïse Conesa, the curator, details her intentions on the theme and explains her scenographic choices.
“Fragilities”: such is the common theme chosen for this new edition of the Bourse du Talent, an emerging talent award. How has its interpretation emerged this year around the fragilities of human beings and the world?
We met with Didier de Faÿs, founder of Photographie.com, around the winners’ images, and, very quickly, this idea emerged about photographers pointing out the disorders of the world and the faults of humanity all while highlighting the importance of resilience in the face of existence’s challenges. Whether it is about the vulnerability of children in the photo series of Youqine Lefevre’s or Laurent Elie Badessi, or even the plight of refugees with Jean-Michel André and Myriam Meloni, you notice a precariousness as moving as it is outraging. Such is the power of the photographers of the Bourse du Talent, moving us with unique, universal stories that try to revive the mobilising power of the eye, to “rearm the viewer’s eyes,” according to George Didi-Huberman’s expression.
Finally, this year were are observing, in an even more precise way than previous editions, a break from the conventional codes of the photographic medium, celebrating a hybridization with other artistic expressions — drawing with Anita Pouchard-Serra, painting with Chloé Jafé… In this sense, this instability can also appear as a force of renewal.
The Bibliothèque Nationale de France [the National Library of France, or ( “BnF”) has hosted the Bourse du Talent exhibition for several years, and starting last year was completed by a publication by Editions Delpire. What assessment of the state and vitality of emerging photography can we take from that?
It’s actually more than ten years that BnF has hosted this unmissable event in order to be on the pulse of contemporary art photography. Great movements have materialized over the years. It is the end of an immediate reporting aesthetic in favor of more of a long-term reporting aesthetic, which attests to the photographers’ civic engagement with their subjects, a photograph where the conventional genres of art history (portrait, landscape…) are no longer really effective, and techniques and artistic expressions intermix. The increasing public success of these editions indicate that today the view of photographers is necessary to give testimony, to critique, and also re-enchant our daily life.
We are happy for the support given to us by Editions Delpire for the past two years, attesting to the prestigious publishing house’s historic engagement in favor of emerging photography. A book of this quality is also a passport for other creative adventures about which the young photographers can boast.
As part of the exhibition at the BnF that you conceive each year in close collaboration with Didier de Faÿs, the winners have a carte blanche to present their series on very important exhibition walls. The prints and impressions made by the laboratory Picto show the diversity of the technical and aesthetic approaches. How do you proceed to come up with such a collective exhibition, and how do you give its diversity such unity?
Picto’s generous investment is the keystone of this event. The photographers recognize the care the laboratory teams take with their prints which sometimes call for real technical challenges! This year, for example, we have the beauty of Charlotte Mano’s prints. The almost pictorial rendering of her work is sublimated by a matte and textured paper. This exigence of quality and this work always carried out with profound respect for the integrity of the photographic project contributes to this impression of unity. Similarly, in the decor (conceived by Didier de Faÿs and in accordance with the service of BnF’s exhibitions), the choice of a fair balance between thematic progression and formal connivance amongst the images is essential to bring coherence.
In the “Fashion” category, the jury chose the series Fashion Misfits by Indian photographer Sanjyot Telang, made with young people with down syndrome. Can photography convey other values than that of luxury and beauty stereotypes?
For a few years, we have seen that fashion photography is rather more a mirror of societal evolution than a vacuum. Photographers leave the studio, envision more natural, less prepared poses, casting their models by choosing to value a beauty far from what is imposed by fashion shows. In the past, this interest in emancipation and innovation resided more in the clothing, but today the model, the environment, counts as much as what is being worn. The “fashion” section of the Bourse du Talent could almost be renamed “lifestyle” as we have gotten out of conventions and simple equations where elegance always rhymed with luxury and beauty with perfection. Fashion photographers are distilling a discourse in favor of diversity and tolerance.
The work of the photographers exhibited integrate the collections of the BnF’s department of Prints and photography. How do the works of emerging talents become part of the institution’s collection?
At the BnF, we are very attached to the promotion of contemporary art. Monitoring current photography, its thematic and aesthetic evolutions, is essential, and we regularly accompany the photographers in their projects through acquisitions and exhibitions. The distinctive characteristic of the BnF’s photography collection is to conserve and give value to all types of photography. Fashion photography, reporting, “creative” photography to use Jean-Claude Lemagny’s terminology…, there is nothing exclusive about it, and that is what makes it so strong. In this sense, the collaboration with the Bourse du Talent being committed to showing a many faceted photography contributes to this decompartmentalisation. Thanks to the generosity of the photographers and Picto Foundation we have integrated hundreds of prints from the Bourse du Talent, which constitute an invaluable testimony of the vivacity of photography during this past decade. Many are “emerging” photographers whose quality of work was immediately recognized by the Bourse du Talent and who, today, are exhibited on the walls of the major international museums. The BnF can only boast about giving them visibility at the start of their career and preserving their works for the generations to come!
Bourse du talent 2017
December 15, 2017 through March 4, 2018
Bibliothèque François Mitterrand
Quai François Mauriac
75706 Paris
France
