Here we find the developing work of three young artists, Oscar Dumas, Julie Fisher and Pierre Toussaint, offering to audiences extraordinary stories, all of which have in common, by unsheathing an artist’s sensibility, the will to go beyond the obvious.The work of Oscar Dumas evokes ‘tourist scenes’. Not for him a reportage on stereotypical touristic anecdotes; rather, he uses tourist situations as if they were paroxysmic representations of our link to reality, as mediated by the image, thus altering our representational system and aesthetizing our view of the world. The idea is to see the real as one sphere of the symbolic realm, the signs of which form signifying structures that lead onward to other images. Julie Fisher’s Les passeurs (Passers by) explores the sudden appearance and disappearance of living beings in the heart of strange, inhospitable environments such as a freezing desert. For her, photography stems from a desire to look the world in the eye so closely that traces of the unformed, the unsayable, are perceptible to the sense of touch. The Metronome series of Pierre Toussaint is made up of instantaneous encounters between bodies and a camera in a city environment. The act is planned but gives way to chance, which regulates the encounter in its own way. The element of surprise comes from the formal, primitive communication between body and urban texture. Here one finds expressive fragments of human nature—anonymous, rooted—on their way to becoming ‘authentic visual events’.Just before receiving their diplomas, these three students were selected by a jury consisting of François Hébel, director of Rencontres d’Arles, Géraldine Lay, photographer and production director at Éditions Actes Sud, and Bertrand Mazeirat, manager of the Domaine du Château d’Avignon.