The fourth edition of the PORTRAIT(S) festival of Vichy opened. Until the 4th September 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 of outside it, in the open air. L’Oeil de la Photographie brings you the work of one photographer from the programme every day. Today, focus on « Here Again » by Paola De Pietri.
… The person and his or her relationship with the environment lie at the heart of this work, but now more than ever the photographer is asking about the relationship between each one’s identity, land, and origins. Here, again is a series of portraits of mothers carrying their ten-month-old babies in their arms.
They have been photographed in the street or sometimes on the edge of a country road near their homes.
One can find again two of the recurrent themes that characterize her work: the unexpected uniqueness of the setting and the momentary experience of the landscape. To these can be added the idea of intersection, where the vertical line of family descendents (one generation leads to another) crosses the horizontal line defined by the contours of the landscape. In this series of work the peculiarity of the natural surroundings, or rather, the strange environments (both inhabited spaces and urban landscapes) is once again highlighted by certain images where the landscape – cultivated or natural – contains no human presence.
… The backgrounds have been chosen very carefully: the women portrayed have been photographed beyond the protective perimeter of their homes, standing in the street or in the middle of a public space – nowadays part of the social space. The importance of these surrounding spaces, where the women are exhibiting their bodies, lends a sense of vulnerability to the subjects. Their apparent solitude renders them highly conscious of themselves. The settings where they are posing help to create the identity and individuality of their, still fragile, children.
From the essay by Frits Gierstberg, in Images au Centre, 2003, Edition du patrimoine
FESTIVAL
PORTRAIT(S)
From June 10th to September 4th, 2016
Here Again
Centre Culturel Valery-Larbaud
03200 Vichy
France
