Usually, it happens in the Workshops at the Rencontre d’Arles. It is there that Olympus has presented the dialogues of renowned photographers with young graduates of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles. For the first time, the nine pairs are meeting again in an exhibition in Paris at the Filles du Calvaire Gallery and in a book published by Editions Filigranes. Guided visit and interview with Didier Quilain of Olympus.
“It all begins with a call to the 3rd year students of the school in Arles, for projects”, explains Fanny Dupechez. “After an interview of thirty minutes that I conduct with the candidates, Didier Quilain and I selected three each year for the last three years so that the event today reunites eighteen photographers”.
Facing the students: well known photographers that Olympus support continuously: Jean-Christian Bourcart, Sarah Moon, Stanley Greene, Denis Rouvre, Françoise Huguier, Antoine d’Agata, Paolo Woods, Dorothée Smith and Denis Darzacq. Once the pairs are created, the principle is simple: to choose about fifteen images and respond photographically to this corpus though dialogue with the referent. For the student the challenge is sizeable since, of course, it is not to imitate the master.
From each conversation, which is spread over three to four months and which takes different forms according to each one, springs an original body of work linking more or less directly with the referent’s images. With Mathieu Rosier and Jean-Christian Bourcart it is the subject, the prostitutes and the hidden. Jeannie Abert took possession of Stanley Greene’s images to create collages aligned with work that she had begun at the school. Meanwhile, by photographing urban architecture at night, Steven Daniel has given a living environment to Denis Rouvre’s Cosplayers. For his part Santiago Torres worked on the theme of anonymity, as did Antoine d’Agata, but with his own approach and with a radically different result. Sometimes the similarities were visual, like Dorothée Smith and Rebecca Topakian, Françoise Huguier and Sajede Sharifi. They could be obvious as with Denis Darzacq and Swen Renault or otherwise surprising as with Paolo Woods and Elsa Leydier… In the end, what matters is that these complement and echo each other.
“This idea of the mentor and the artist is interesting,” concluded Christine Ollier, who designed the staging of the exhibition with Fanny Dupêchez. “And this approach to long term support led by Olympus is not that far removed from the work that I do with the artists in the gallery”.
EXHIBITION
Echanges de Vues – The Olympus Photographic Conversations
Until January 16th, 2016
Galerie Les filles du Calvaire
17 rue des Filles du Calvaire
75003 Paris
France
BOOK
Echanges de Vues – The Olympus Photographic Conversations
Filigranes, Ecole nationale supérieure de la photographie d’Arles/Olympus
136 pages, 25,00 €
