We continue and present the projects selected by Les Nuits Photographiques 2015 awards, which took place on September 19th. Today is about “Gran Canaria Là-bas si j’y suis“, directed by Estelle Chaigne, young french photographer.
During a stay in Berlin in July 2009, I found slides of a trip at a flea market, 90 photos retracing the holiday of 4 people, presumably in 1970s.
Likened to a holiday image corpus that we are used to seeing and to producing, and in parallel devoid of any information about the location of their trip. I bought them for two euros.
Since then, I’ve applied myself to extracting from the images everything they contain (in the form of projections, installations, objects and photographs). Facing the absence of their authors, what remains?
After having taking them to Venezuela to confront them with the exoticism they represented, having extracted all the portraits in order to capture as intimately as possible the portraits that I might have them, having interviewed thirty people on the content of these images, made several installations, I finally learned where these pictures were taken. In November 2011, a visitor to my studio reveals to me the holiday destination of my slides. “Look at the licence plates, GC is Gran Canaria.”
So I’m off to Gran Canaria in February 2012, in the footsteps of these images. After two weeks of investigation, I brought back 35 static shot videos of the locations I’d found and what they have to say today.
FESTIVAL
Les Nuits Photographiques
Until December 12th, 2015
Pavillon Carré de Baudouin
121 Rue de Ménilmontant
75020 Paris
France
http://lesnuitsphotographiques.com
