The fourth edition of the PORTRAIT(S) festival of Vichy opens its doors . Until September 4th Vichy is an outpost of today’s photography for a season and is presenting to the public some exhibitions centered exclusively around the art of the portrait. This new edition is showing nine artists whose exhibitions are taking place simultaneously in the city centre and around, in the open air. L’Oeil de la Photographie brings you the work of one photographer from the programme every day. Today, focus on « Days in Vichy » by Anton Renborg.
Pacing Vichy’s streets, parks and bars by day and night, in both fair weather and foul, young Swedish photographer Anton Renborg became fascinated by the special atmosphere of the spots he visited. He has strolled by stately villas swaggering beneath an over-excess of ornament, wandered up to mysterious, untidy houses that seem coiled up so as to hide the secrets lurking within. He has walked by faces bearing the marks of time, ghosts from the Belle Epoque, and has snapped bodies barely out of childhood, yet already compelled to play adult games. He has opened doors that closed right back on him, gone up broad avenues and no-entry streets, and has sipped at the well of the gaze of young girls in flower and the Fontaine des Célestins, whose mineral water lightens up the complexion of old men. He offers images of a city based on appearance and the concealed at one and the same time, a health resort infused with the greatness of its imperial past, a worldly, stylish town, a place of display that is also a shadow theatre where dark figures wait, cloaked in solitude, when night falls.
During the daytime, Anton Renborg maintains a certain distance from his subjects, but at night he draws closer to their bodies, casting a gentle, benevolent, totally non-judgmental gaze on them. His clean, unaffected photographs act as catalysts of fiction. Thanks to him, we run into a dandy in his seventies, his eyes sneering under the rim of a panama hat, go for a break into a café with oriental-style wall paintings, trot about drawn by the miniature harnesses of earlier times, and are invited into after-parties held behind closed screens. Days and nights, highs and lows, brightness and darkness, all is swept into his photographs with their bright notes. Through these images, almost none of them landscapes or panoramas, almost all vertical, the city seems to be living its secret stories in isolation. Illuminated by the bluish dream of its freshwater basins, Vichy admires itself in its upside-down reflections.
FESTIVAL
PORTRAIT(S)
From June 10th to September 4th, 2016
Days in Vichy
Outdoor Exhibition
Parvis de l’Eglise Saint Louis & Parc des Ailes
03200 Vichy
France
https://www.ville-vichy.fr/agenda/festival-portraits-2016
http://antonrenborg.se
