The Planches Contact Festival celebrates its fifteenth edition! From October 19, 2024, to January 5, 2025, Deauville’s photography festival will take over the entire city, creating “a journey between stories, dreams, and poetry.” Here is the introductory note from Laura Serani, the festival’s artistic director:
The 15th edition confirms the orientations of this unique festival, based on support for creation, production and the principle of presenting original exhibitions, resulting from work carried out by photographers invited in residence.
Initiated and supported by Philippe Augier (mayor) and the City of Deauville, with constant and enthusiastic commitment, Planches Contact has grown up under bright stars. Year after year, it has expanded its territory, the number of guest photographers and the panorama of fields explored, taking on more of Deauville and the public arena, and weaving a network of active partnerships enabling artists to present their work beyond and elsewhere.
A veritable laboratory for diverse experimentation, Planches Contact is an opportunity to deepen existing research and initiate new ones. The festival is a space for ongoing reflection, both on the means of expression of photography, and in the ways in which it is presented, with particular attention paid to its rendition through an appropriate and original scenography. But it is also a place to reflect on the state of the world and to exercise resistance, by creating parallel realities through openness and questioning.
From our privileged “positions”, we are witnessing the expansion of wars and conflicts, born – like other infamous ones – to be “blitzkriegs”, which continue with violence and cruelty against all logic and humanistic thought. International solidarity seems to bend before reasons of state and inexorable economic laws, and fear and feelings of powerlessness risk leading us astray and legitimizing the unacceptable.
The experience of Deauville in these sad times has enabled us to share spaces and moments of creative freedom in the kind of community committed to rethinking the world and showing it as it is, or could be.
The cohabitation in residence of photographers of different origins, ages and horizons, with interests and practices that invest the field of the possible, produces exchanges and sharing in a spirit of openness and solidarity that is both unusual and precious. A community is created each time, joining those of previous years…
A small “virtuous circle” where, in a positive dynamic, new projects are born like fireflies in the darkness.
Once again this year, more than twenty photographers from all over Europe, Africa, the USA and China shared this extraordinary experience, confronting their vision of the world and their way of portraying it during their residencies. These projects, in the form of installations, exhibitions and projections, from the beach to the Franciscaines, a veritable beacon of culture, enable the public to see differently.
Whether it’s a rereading of history, social issues or intimate questions, the artists’ gaze continues to open windows on the surrounding world as much as on inner worlds.
The entire program is based on an often poetic rereading of reality, and on the need to recall its history, origins and magic.
Dominique Issermann’s Niveau Zéro on the beach opens the ball with nostalgia and elegance.
Following exhibitions by Robert Doisneau and Malick Sidibé, Raymond Depardon, Martin Parr, Koto Bolofo, Peter Lindbergh and other legends, the large-scale installation on the beach is dedicated to Dominique Issermann. Dazzled from the outset by the elegance of her fashion photography and her portraits, for which she is recognized as one of the most important photographers of our time, we discover here, in an unprecedented context, representative and sometimes lesser-known images from her exemplary career. Portraits, silhouettes and landscapes, reminiscences or mirages, like calligraphy, draw the story of a dream on the beach.
The artists in residence have all treated the area with astonishing projects and results, exploring the boundaries of time, gender and memory, between reality and fiction.
To Phillip Toledano’s attention and fascination with artificial intelligence, the festival is dedicating the first major exhibition of his latest project Another America, a surprising rewriting of American history that will be presented alongside the work produced during the residency; always balancing between historical fact and fake news in these time of conspiracy.
From AI to the reappropriation of old techniques, with a return to the use of the camera and laboratory research by many photographers; from Sara Imloul’s sensitive account of the memory of water, to Julien Mignot’s research into the passage of time and its perception.
Éric Bouvet, invited to take up a residency with the photo4food foundation, a valued friend of the festival, developed a major project on France, a social and political portrait of the French, with a stopover in Normandy to meet its inhabitants. Both projects, in their entirety, will be presented for the first time in Deauville.
Patricia Morosan has focused her research on memory and transmission on the rocks of the Vaches Noires, an extraordinary geological site, which is featured in the exhibition through photographs, lithographs, films and drawings.
Following in the footsteps of Joan Foncuberta, Carolle Benitah and Salvatore Puglia, Alessandro Calabrese has been invited to continue his interventions and re-reading of the town’s collections.
Richard Pak returns to Deauville as an island thief, and Bettina Pittaluga slips into the intimacy of Normandy’s inhabitants for a series of sensitive, evocative portraits. Coco Amardeil has taken up the challenge of inventing a funny, quirky Normandy primer for the delight of children and adults alike.
Huang Xiaoliang, invited thanks to a new partnership with the Yishu 8 association, the originator of a residency program for artists, projected here his subtle shadow theater. The festival also presents a selection of his previous works, paintings and films.
Another new feature is the launch of a photography and music residency, which will result in the production of an original show presented during the festival. Alisa Resnik, already in residence in 2019, and David Bryant of the iconic Canadian band Godspeed You! Black Emperor, accompanied by images by Michael Ackermann, Lorenzo Castore and Klavdij Sluban, open this new adventure.
To mark Fnac’s 70th anniversary, the festival presents a major group exhibition on the theme of vacations, featuring a selection of photographs from the Fnac collection, from Lartigue to Martin Parr.
Laura Serani
More information:
