As an artistic discipline and means of expression, photography reveals a part of ourselves. Its practice can also be hugely revealing about our passions and obsessions, and can reflect our emotional attachments.
The sensitivity and desires of each participant will hence be the departure point for each of the photographic projects undertaken in Arles.
The through line of this approach will be the portrait of a person or a group of people, from the pretext to the realisation of a series.
Choosing to approach this or that individual, if necessary relying on pointers established by the Rencontres d’Arles, will enable participants to complete a first positioning. This provides a point of departure that could amply linger on places, an atmosphere, details, or that could easily make issues, a plot stand out.
With Stéphanie Lacombe as guide, by alternating the shot, selection and thought, it will be a matter of creating a whole testifying to a personal vision capable of being attached to a certain reality, or, on the contrary, turning towards a purely fictional and dreamlike fiction.
Obviously, the question of choice on an aesthetic level will play a part, while remaining open to a broad range of experimentation and expression, framing and texture, frozen time or moving instant – these elements that allow us to give substance to and to refine a singular vision.
To conclude, the workshop will linger on the notion of medium, envisaging a form or forms in which the completed series could materialise: a booklet, notebook, screening, press-book, object or hanging on a wall.
In order to discover each person’s desires and sensibilities more easily, all participants are invited to come along with photographs they have made, as well as with favourite images (cut from newspapers and magazines, photocopies, scans, printed, books, etc.).
Stéphanie LACOMBE:
Stéphanie Lacombe graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in 2001. The following year, she joined the Taïga press agency. An independent art photographer, she has been distributing her work through the Picturetank.com network since 2003. She was awarded the Special Jury Prize, given by Sébastiaô Salgado, at the Grand Concours Photo N&B Agfa, and in 2006 she received the Special Photographer Prize from the Fondation Jean-Luc Lagardère, and the Niépce Prize in 2009. In 2008, she published a photo-reportage in the XXI journal. Many exhibitions of her work have been held in Paris, at the Bibliothèque National de France (Jeunes photographes de la Bourse du Talent), Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Église de la Madeleine, during the Mois de la Photo Off and also at the Rencontres d’Arles.
www.myop.fr/fr/photographe/stephanie-lacombe
