When times are tough, one tends to forget that photography can also be light, playful, and fun; that it is a shared delight, a parlor game, an ever-repeated magic show. It is pleasure rather than leisure, the latter always having the effect (thanks, Pascal!) of driving us away from what’s essential. A photo is no longer simply itself when it plays.
This frame of mind has been adopted by the Festival Images in Vevey, Switzerland, which is in full swing on the shores of Lake Geneva. This is the fifth edition of the festival since its director, Stefano Stoll, has built a strong brand identity: outdoor image shows and XXL formats, bridging a photography festival and a contemporary art biennial. This cultural project is also part of urban marketing, since Vevey has been developing its identity as the “City of images” for the past 20 years, in the aftermath of deindustrialization.
Suggested by the omnipresent lake, the theme of Festival Images 2016 is immersion: plunging into a liquid, but also into the approach of an artist or into the depths of digital technologies. There is a nod to the chemical baths and the developer and fixer that used to fill darkrooms with their fumes. There is also the ambition to spotlight the latest transformations of the medium.
Photographs are thus exhibited under water and on its surface, dangling from fishing poles. Some dance on the waves, thanks to a hydromechanical device. Elsewhere, it’s the eye that must dive into virtual reality headsets, goggles, frames, installations, and algorithms. Stephen Gill’s images, shot in a water-filled chamber, are invisible unless sprinkled with water from a fountain.
You enter lives, caves, landscapes, buildings, and, of course, images. You can even become embedded in Martin Parr’s photos thanks to a process called greenscreening, a sort of photo booth that transports you, the visitor, into a crowd of tourists captured by the British photographer. And then you can take a nap in a bedroom-gallery with images made by Alec Soth in a Japanese hotel.
Among some 75 projects designed by artists from 15 countries, let’s pause over the Vevey International Photography Award, which went last year to the American photographer Christian Patterson, former assistant of William Eggleston. Patterson used the grant to purchase an old grocery store in Mississippi, along with its stock of canned food, in order to photograph each element in his New York studio. The whole thing—the grocery store and its representations—has been transported to Vevey, to Festival Images, as if to fulfill Andy Warhol’s prophecy: “Someday, all department stores will become museums, all museums will become department stores.”
Luc Debraine
Luc Debraine is a cultural reporter at the Swiss magazine L’Hebdo.
Festival Images Vevey
from September 10 to October 2, 2016
Open every day, 11AM to 7PM, free admission.
Pl. de la Gare 3
1800 Vevey
Switzerland
www.images.ch
