Everywhere—in the heart of towns and cities, in villages and natural beauty spots—students from the National School of Photography have captured on-stage images of performances or exhibitions of music, opera, theatre, dance and the visual arts. These venues that host today’s arts are installed in remarkable settings which, as the pictures attest, attract audiences who are pleased to be a part of these unforgettable moments.
The photographs render landscapes and skies, gazes and light, sets and costumes, gestures and colours.
These photographs have been taken over the years by: Emilie Ballif, Caroline Ablain, Claire Béguier, Thibaut Baron, Laurence Andrieu, Marie Guichaoua, Corinne Janier, Alan Eglinton, Clémentine Crochet, Yves Coqueugniot, Pauline Julier, Anne Greuzat, Henriette Desjonquères, Denise Oliver Fierro, Caroline Boyer and Marikel Lahana. The Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Regional Collection of Contemporary Art (FRAC) is partnering this event: Laurent Grasso’s video installation Soyez les bienvenus (‘Welcome’), which it acquired in 2002, will be shown at the Abbaye de Montmajour. ‘Each of his films offers an unidentified filming object’s perspective on a reality that partly escapes it and in which it does not participate. A crowd has formed, attracted by its centre. Something is turning around the outside as if to drill into the reality and see for itself’, wrote Emilie Renard in the Prêt à prêter catalogue. In counterpoint, a set of photographs will be presented as well as the film Firefly, co-produced and acquired by FRAC in 2008. The film was made on a journey between Marseille and northern Scotland on board a Peugeot 504 fitted with a fuchsia light box. The car is a sculpture that Pierre Malphettes moves around a mapped space, enabling landscapes to be explored differently—by those who see the sculpture-vehicle moving through the landscape and by the film’s viewers. The film explores the notion of sculpture and its relationship with the landscape, no longer as a motif and environment to be recreated by the sculpted elements themselves, but as an environment that the sculpture inhabits, disrupts and puts on show while retaining its own minimalist visual vocabulary.