ENSP PROMOTION 2008

These three young photographers have been chosen from the graduation class at the National School of Photography in June 2007. Selected by a jury from a longer list drawn up by the school’s teaching team, they are the first to figure in what is to become an annual Rencontres d’Arles event.

As a sample Marikel Lahana, Sung Hee Lee and Christophe Mattern allow the public’s attention to be drawn to the diversity of interests and formal approaches characterising student work at the school.

Marikel Lahana is presenting photos from her Fictions Aptères (Fictions without Wings) series. This is a sombre work in many respects: bodies, portraits and groupings all marked by close attention to their shapes and deformations, their curves, their skin, their gazes – all painfully drawn out of darkness or emerging from a grey background which, as The Fall suggests, could well collapse beneath them or absorb them once again.

Wherever he goes Sung Hee Lee photographs billboards with no images on them. Stripped of their function, these immense, imposing structures rise like void, useless – but always strikingly present – objects amid the landscapes they overlook; like useless furniture or signals, everywhere identical in changing contexts and under changing skies in different parts of the world.

Christophe Mattern sets up his view camera in a chosen space for a certain length of time. Without moving the tool of his trade, he records what takes place in that space, even when nothing takes place. Then he brings the resultant images together to form a single one on which, with the most absolute discretion, the successively recorded instants come to coexist without conflict.

Prints produced by Dupon Digital Lab.