skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Rencontres d'Arles:
Photographic Impressions
By Christian Lacroix, guest curator of the Rencontres d’Arles 2008.
In responding to François Hébel and François Barré’s invitation to guest-curate the Rencontres d’Arles, there could be no escaping the temptation to curate my own impressions.
Nonetheless, I wanted to free myself of nostalgic sepia and black-and-white and to play host to colour – the colours and nuances of friends and artists, of old and recent encounters and discoveries. These are the guests that make up the programme...
Those expecting a “fashionista” festival will feel justifiably disappointed. And besides, what does la mode mean nowadays? I would prefer the masculine: un mode, a way of being, showing oneself, appearing. So do not look solely at the poses and postures, the fabrics and facepaint; dig beneath the skin and standpoint, and close in on what – among the millions or billions of images that have passed through my retina – has caught my eye, captured my tastes and colours, on the trail of white pebbles to guide those visiting this 39th edition.
Jean-Christian Bourcart_France
Born in 1960 in Colmar. Lives and works in New York City since 1997.
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL DAY OF LIFE
At seventeen I came to Paris with a single address in my pocket, that of a company specialising in wedding photos. I learnt the tricks of the trade and earned my crust that way for a number of years. Later on I would become a photojournalist, but it all began in churches and parks and since that time I’ve never lost my fascination with these representations of happiness... A good wedding photograph is a photograph sold, but a part of my output found no buyers and lay yellowing in boxes. In the course of the years tens of thousands of images accumulated in this way – enough to fill a room. It was with them that I began my collection, digging like a patient archaeologist into these strata of the collective memory. Thus I made up my own album, telling the story of a hybrid family: not such a great family, but a deliberately chosen one, sometimes funny, sometimes innocent, sometimes tragic, fluctuating between the depiction of happiness and the accidents of life – reality, you might call it... The people in these images are a perfect sample of the middle class, archetypes of the new proletariat: suburbanites. So near and yet so far, these are my neighbours, my brothers and sisters, the people we live among to such a point that there’s no telling if we’re part of them or not. It’s also the extent to which I feel involved that allows me to show these images. And as it happens, I’m getting married soon.
Jean-Christian Bourcart.
