The festival Presence (s) photographie is opened until December 3, 2017. Installed in the very heart of Montélimar, on both sides of the Rhône, the festival gathers 32 photographers in 23 various places.
Presentation of the festival by photographer Alain Gualina
” Présence (s) photographie was created in 2013 to promote author’s photography ; at the very first point, the idea was to promote photographers convinced and their art as they all question our relationship to the world. For the last five years, the festival is organized on a high-level, it’s a very convivial event, offering viewers and photographers an opportunity to meet great names in photography, giving visibility to emerging talents. As a singular festival, it distinguished from others by its openness to the world, to its different cultures, by inviting in both exhibitions and screenings concerned authors.
I’ve followed this festival since its beginning, and I had the pleasure of being invited for a personal exhibition in 2016 with my series The castaways or the geography of the doubt. I wanted to testify of its particular character. Throughout its editions, what touched me and interested me iss this tenacious will to place the man at the heart of the photograph of author. With photographers such as Bernard Descamps, Munem Wasif, Hans Silvester, Roland and Sabrina Michaud, Sarah Caron, Denis Brihat for example. To be noted, the programming choices questions photography and its practice. In 2016 for example, Marie Docher’s conference-debate, Seen/Unseen ? How do women make a career (or not) in photography? And, among others, in the 2017 program, the conference-debate by Eric Delamarre on the very sensitive question Are photographs works of the mind?
Not to mention a Marc Riboud retrospective, with his entire series Alaska, which was only been presented in Japan so far. It will be in Montélimar as the main exhibition of this year edition, thanks to Catherine Riboud. ”
Alain Gualina
“Marc Riboud, Alaska” by Catherine Riboud
“In 1958, after a three-year trip to the East and the Far East, Marc Riboud decided to hit the road from Alaska to Mexico. With a friend and an old American car, they followed the Alaska highway in the middle of Winter to reach, a few months later, twenty thousand kilometers to the south, Mexico. The attraction for roads, its open spaces and the unknown, the love of silence and loneliness… Marc is not here today to say what attracted him to this land of snow but when we look at his photos we know in any case what he found there:
Snow erases all ugliness, everything is drawn as on a blank page, as immaculate fields where each human, each animal, each house looks like an unusual, strange, often poetic apparition. Men have an incredibly strong presence because they remain rare, so rare that they often seem to move in a silent film.
In 1958, Alaska did not interest many people. The gold rush was done since a long time, oil wasn’t discovered yet and global warming was a word only known by specialists. Today, Alaska has become one of the thermometers of environmental hazards. Scientists are measuring the melting of glaciers, the erosion of the riverbed, the migration of polar bears to the North. With surprisingly modern visuals, Marc Riboud’s photographs curiously reveal the fragility of this polar world. What’s more fragile, what more ephemeral than the snow seems to tell us this Inuit woman and her little girl manhandled by the icy wind? Today their silent message is more current than ever. ”
Catherine Riboud
Among the highlights:
A round table: The girl with the flower, history of a photograph (on Marc Riboud)
Around the book The Girl with the Flower, Marc Riboud – History of a photograph by Philippe Séclier, published in October 2017. In the presence of the author, Catherine Riboud and Lorène Ducret.
A discussion: The young photography from here and elsewhere,
with Marcos AVILA FORERO (Colombia), Aleksey MYAKISKEV (Russia), Dina OGONOVA (Georgia) and YORIYAS (Morocco).
Pop-up photographic animation: Philippe Ordioni and Rodia Bayginot offer you your “Pop-up” portrait,
like these screens in the screen, which spring up in a surprising way, like those images that unfold in the books when we turn the page … ”
On the banks of the Rhône Meysse-Rochemaure-Le Teil. Photographic installation and choreographic performance of the Moroccan photographer Yoriyas,
Conference: Éric Delamarre ‘Are photographs works of the mind?’
Festival Présence(s) Photographie
Jusqu’au 3 décembre 2017
Montélimar, 26200
France
www.presencesphotographie.fr
