Does a French Photography Style Exist?
Its specificity and strength perhaps lie in its diversity of subject choice and photographic approach. It continually faces other people and places. Livened by this reflection, the theme of MAP 2016 is overflowing with different styles across the work of French photographers.
Photographer Olivier Culmann considers the question of “representation” and pushes it just until its peak with selfies. The author’s eponymous exhibition, thought of as a path, allows one to see a corpus of these works from 2001 to the most recent.
Stéphane Duroy, who was a press photographer and then fled from the media, exercises both a documentary approach and a conceptual vision of the territory between the city of Berlin, Great Britain, and the United States.
Photographic control is flooded around the exhibition of the largest daily French paper “Le Monde”. “French Politics” by photographer Jean-Claude Coutausse observes, defeats, and excoriates men and women of power.
Romain Laurendeau, Camille Lepage Award 2015 recipient, escorts us into the intimacy of the Bab-el-Oued neighborhood in Algeria. Just next door, Marguerite Bornhauser, in an artistic approach, lets us newly discover the mythic work of Francoise Sagan in “8”.
Strongly promoting young talents, MAP in supporting photography education in France through the “Carte Blanche” exhibition available to l’École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles as well as through a new exhibition of three 2016 MAP Awards. Sandra Mehl, Bruno Fontana, and Karla Hiraldo supported by an award of 2500 €.
Gérard Rondeau, reporter of the lasting and portraitist of the ephemeral, invites us on a trip where photography is experienced as a testimony, a piece on his memory.
Finally, the sculptor and photographer Cyril Hatt, close to the Pop Art movement, offers us an original installation where the daily object becomes sacred. More than ever, this edition emphasizes young creators and will bridge them with major names in French photography. One hundred and eighty years after the first photographic image by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826, MAP presents what has come from its lasting effect in France.
