They came. They’re here, the winners of the SFR Young Talents Arles 2001 Prize. Marin Hock, Françoise Beauguion, Claire Delfino, Jean Pierre Dastrugue, Aurélie Durand, Léo Delafontaine.
They embody the young generation of photography with a double connection in regards to their time, social tensions, the geo-political challenges from Gaza to Argentina, and a photography practice in complete (r)evolution.
After leaving “Plis du sommeil” by Claire Delfino, we see the walls of the Saint-Blaise church, at the awakening of a documentary image reexamined and corrected by all of these views that cover the world with the appetite to discover the faces and the ambition of making us a part in a graphic way of their emotion.
It’s Jean Pierre Dastugue the eldest of the new winners of the prize who has searched along his teenage memories traces of that “magic realism” between dream and world confrontation, in a political face to face with himself. Specialized in intimate photographs that draw their fertile roots from his teenage years, Jean-Pierre Dastugue is a traveling bird that likes to peck into the memory for volatile instants restored with a black and white density, closer to suggestion than to demonstration. A fine art to restore us up in arms from a serenade to the memory of a moment that would have been Proust’s favourite –before the opacity of the buried memory disappears again.
Françoise Beauguion needed a quiet conviction to set a “face to face” between Palestinians and Israelis in crossed viewpoints. In their eyes of women, simply and tenderly photographed, is born the complicity of belonging to the same earth. The horizon, projected in search of the other felt so close, sticks spontaneously to the violence and weariness of a permanent conflict. The mild color of their portrait brings hope of a long desired peace.
An interior peace that has not yet been found in the patients at Devinière –the psychotherapy Center at Charleroi in Belgium where Marin Hock went in search of traces of Raymond Depardon at San Clemente. The winner of the Grand Prix Arles SFR 2011 expresses the respect of all these men and women without prejudice. Unparalleled colorist despite being only 20 years old, every one of his images questions in us “the deep mentality” of the perception that we have or this closed world of psychosis. Far from clichés or caricature as Marin’s approach fills his tender frame with a touch of complicit humor.
Or even lightness without superficiality.
Marin Hock’s talent is worth the “Detour”. As in this series, it’s traveling through the USA that he shows the sense of color that brings him “a photographic pleasure without limits”.
A swimming pool bearing only a blue perimeter is the pretext of a sumptuous color splat –that works as an accidental dustbin filled with rubble. It is us that dive in with him into the thickness of this American night near a motel filled with a Hitchcockian atmosphere.
New York buildings looking down, magnificently framed in opposition clair-obscur, the median line by the studded walkways, sparkling in white just as the gleaming roofs of the vans. Marin Hock becomes the geometrician of an aesthetic emotion on the corner of “street photography” in perfect mastered lines.
In the “shining room” of a shoe shop, the man wearing the cream colored tie and a white shirt is the color stain that emerges on the black front of the street. The winner of SFR Paris Photo lives in perpetual fascination as he faces the reality of the world, “to turn anything – he confesses- into a beautiful picture.”
Leo Delafontaire set out to pass the conventional to enrich the myth of “Paris Texas”, the small town made famous by Wim Wenders. Between fascination and realized dreams, Leo masters perfectly his sense of composition in front of landscapes and simple characters from his imaginary museum “made in USA”.
At the crossroads of a multi-faceted training between directing, documentary film, clips and photography, Aurélie Durant took a bus straight from Buenos Aires to Salta, in Argentina. She set up for us the travel experience in the bubble that she quite subtly draws in the “about” aspect and the diversity on a wall or a personality. A constant deliberately manifested zoom effect is found by this promising photography talent, on the road to a new style of photography.
The poetry of the images by Claire Delfino has left a place for the awakening of a large acuteness in front of all of these living pictures of an ongoing photographic production. Following Isabel Muñoz, Patrick Tournebeuf, “Godfather SRF Young Talents Photo 2011” closes the exhibition on the walls of the church Saint-Blaise with some of his works in large format from the Théâtre of the Château de Versailles to the restoration of the Grand Palais. A “Monumental *” work, as the one made by “SFR young talents” since 2006. The partnership of the mobile phone company with Rencontres is also incontrovertible as the success of the permanent dialogue created with prizes and annual collaborations (Polka, le Bal, Fétard, ImageSingulières, Paris Photo …) with thousands of candidates on the walls of Arles. Lucia Herrero, François Regis Durand, Marc Montméat, awarded in 2010 told the new winners 2011: “Without SFR Young Talents we would never be where we are today, on the way to real recognition, filled with projects”. An assessment that is a guarantee for the future and an antidote for the crisis that current photography is going through.
Alain Mingam
( Curator, Consultant SFR Jeunes Talents )
• SHOT magazine SFR N° 08
• « MONUMENTAL » de Patrick Tournebeuf : Co-édition « La Librairie de la Galerie et la MEP ».
