For its thirteenth edition, the Festival de photographie Présence(s) in Montélimar has chosen to honor Swiss photographic creation.
Faithful to its ambition to explore the diversity of contemporary visual languages, the Festival invites a selection of authors from Switzerland both men and women, whose work places the human being at the heart of artistic reflection. They all share the same demand: to maintain a subtle balance between content and form, between the rigor of the gaze and critical thought, inviting the public to think about and feel the world as it is going…
This 2026 edition is structured around a guiding thread that is both a question and an exclamation: “The Way of the World”.
This leitmotif, the true red thread of the program, pays tribute to the writer, traveler, and photographer Nicolas Bouvier, a major figure in Swiss culture.
In his emblematic book The Way of the World (1963), Bouvier recounts, a long journey with his painter friend Thierry Vernetin in a Topolino from Belgrade to the far reaches of Pakistan. These wanderings, at the crossroads of travel diary, poetic meditation, and photographic reportage, question our way of inhabiting, traversing, and looking at the world.
On this occasion, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montélimar Agglomération is devoting an exceptional exhibition to Nicolas Bouvier, exploring his multiple facets: travel writer, curious iconographer, photographer of the intangible. Echoing this tribute, the invited Swiss photographers make their singular gazes resonate throughout Montélimar, taking over various sites in the city and surrounding areas.
Thus, SwissPrésence(s) proposes an encounter between memory and modernity, between past and present. An invitation to rediscover, through the prism of contemporary Swiss photography, the beauty, fragility, and complexity of the world.
Francis Traunig, photographer and exhibition curator for this 13th edition of the Festival.
Nicolas Crispini, photographer, exhibition curator and scenographer for the N. Bouvier exhibition at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montélimar.
Festival de photographie Présence(s)
May 23 – June 21, 2026
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