Portrait(s) 2022: TEN years of photography in Vichy

Portrait(s) celebrates its 10th edition! The Vichy photographic event, dedicated to the age-old art of portraiture, takes place at the Palais des Congrès, a showcase housed in the Vichy Opera House, for indoor exhibitions. In addition to this emblematic place of the city, located in the heart of the thermal park, the other exhibition sites of the festival, located outside: the esplanade of the lake of Allier, the place Saint-Louis and the square of the station.

So this is TEN years of photography at Vichy.

We are delighted to be able to inform you that the Portrait(s) tenth annual festival will be centred in the Convention Centre, a jewel sheltered within the Vichy Opera House, that magnificent, emblematic place in the city.

Over these past ten years, the work of great as well as that of emerging young photographers has been exhibited, producing a diversity of viewpoints that offer the public a photographic interchange of the depictions of the human figure through a wide variety of practices and approaches. Yet it will always be the case to look at our world thanks to our guest photographers who, each in their own way, bring us to see, reflect, and think about the realities of this upset, vulnerable world they reveal to us. Photography asks questions, and will continue to do so.

This year, thirteen exhibitions are being held, one of which is a new photography encounter run by Brigitte Patient. Its role will be to engage curiosity, and arouse the desire to see and understand photography through an audio/visual picture reading.

It has touched our hearts on the occasion of this yearly festival to present hitherto unpublished projects and enrich the programme by inviting different artistic practices to join together with photography in order to propose a committed multi-programme.

Director Christophe Acker is attending the residency this year, offering a rough and tumble with a city that he is making dance, through his approach and poetic vision. An unpublished film and an exhibition will be shown on this occasion. A group exhibition, the organization of which has been assigned to Marie Magnier and Charlotte Boudon, offers us a body of pictures including photos, videos and clips. These ladies invite us to discover the various emotions of the body through the eyes of great artists. Artist Éric Poupy will be eye to eye with photographer Henrike Stahl, who will make us enter their “world”. Not to mention the image-centred transmission projects that complete the rich programme of this year's Portrait(s) festival.

We will be delighted to share with you a number of street theatre and musical performances at the festival opening, and cultural encounters related to Portrait(s) photography all summer long.

Thank you to the Photographers and the artists. A big thank you to the Portrait(s) teams in Vichy and Paris who work hard every day to ensure that this photography festival sticks to its route, and in particular to the City Council of Vichy, Vichy Culture and the Convention Centre, the set designers and the technical teams. Thanks also to our faithful, valued partners who have been involved with us since Portrait(s) first opened: Neuflize OBC, SNCF Gares & Connexions, Cinq Étoiles Productions and the DUPON laboratory.

Celebrating culture is a way of supporting creation and freedom of expression. For this we are so happy once more to find that you have come to discover this, our tenth festival, in the majestic space of the Convention Centre. Ten years and a new page that opens, what else can there be to make us hope we will surprise you yet again and help you discover so many artists in the years to come!

Welcome to Vichy!!

Fany Dupêchez, Artistic director

Program
Portrait(s) celebrates its tenth anniversary this year!
On this special occasion, Portrait(s) occupies the Convention Centre where the inside exhibitions will be staged. This emblematic city site, located at the centre of the thermal park, takes its place alongside the other festival exhibition sites located outside: the esplanade along Lac d'Allier, Place Saint-Louis, and the station square. Thirteen exhibitions make up the rich photographic adventure being proposed for this, its tenth anniversary, with one new encounter taking place at the heart of the festival, La voix du regard (The Voice of the Gaze), an audio/ visual carte blanche.

Lac d'Allier esplanade
A retrospective. Through a combination of the photographic portrait, the pictorial tradition and the taste of staging and costume, Omar Victor Diop mixes practices and builds a work that is both seductive and political, one committed to a salutary re-evaluation of the history of Black people.


Convention Centre
Impertinent and humorous, Meryl Meisler plunges us into a captivating city and times, 1970s and 1980s New York. Her shots celebrate disco evenings and strip-tease clubs, her Jewish family and Long Island suburb, or life in a high school in one of the roughest Brooklyn neighbourhoods. Henrike Stahl and Éric Poupy, a photographer and a designer, present an immersive installation combining photographs and drawings. The hybrid practices of this duo play at the centre and on the edge, on oneness and division, all at the same time. Their graphic, poetic images invite the onlooker to modify their point of view on photography and the world... For two years, Kourtney Roy studied the land along Highway 16 in Canada, also known as the Highway of Tears, where Indigenous women have mysteriously been disappearing for over forty years. Here she photographs a pile of undergrowth, there a service station or a solitary house, simultaneously stepping into landscape and memory.



Charlotte Boudon and Marie Magnier, from the Galerie Les filles du calvaire, make the festival swing this year by offering a choice of photos, videos and clips all about the body in motion. From Charles Fréger's wahine girls to Jeanette Beckman's break dancers, welcome to the dance! With his series Circesque, Christian Tagliavini gives body to a stunning galaxy of circus performers who live in his imagination before they bring life to his compositions, which pair off the angel and the buffoon, the beautiful and the strange. From his side, Alain Willaume produces a mysterious work that blurs our certainties. Everyone sees in it the reflection of their own questions about our time... Poised between marvel and menace, appeasement and dissidence, his world already depicts the afterworld, when calm waters are the reverse of troubled waters. Olivier Culmann, a photographer and collector with a profound knowledge of India, has brought together an astounding combination of black and white portraits from the Komath Studio, a photo studio in Kochi, Kerala. These pictures, which spread over more than fifty years, bear witness to the strict codes governing portraits in Indian studios.


Place Saint-Louis
Through the casual British acknowledgement Life actually, The Anonymous Project provides a selection of intimate moments and family portraits from its rich collection of Kodachrome colour prints. These sometimes comical, sometimes worrying situations tell the story of our lives and more about our common points and our humanity. They are an unfiltered, honest, joyful celebration of life.


Des mots pour voir (Words to See)
Portrait(s) and the Neuflize OBC Enterprise Foundation are pursuing the innovative projet that was launched in 2018: to bring the treasures of the Neuflize OBC Enterprise Collection to the knowledge of the general public, a device for analytic encounters about the works to encourage an open, ongoing dialogue between members of the public, academics, experts and artists. This year, three works by Valérie Belin are being shown at the festival. Public comments gathered by the mediator over the exhibition will be circulated in the exhibition room.

La voix du regard (The Voice of the Gaze)
On this, its tenth anniversary, Portrait(s) is launching a new photography encounter by inviting Brigitte Patient to an audio/visual carte blanche. Brigitte Patient's unique words devote themselves to hearing, in dialogue with a photograph by British photographer Trish Murtha, a story about sustaining curiosity and arousing the desire to see....

8th Photography Residency
This year's photography residency has been awarded to French artist Christophe Acker who has worked with the students at Vichy dance schools, a horsewoman and an acrobat to create the astounding offer of a "danced" visit around the city through photographs and film stills that are on show at the station square, and a film being shown at the Convention Centre.


Portrait(s) invites itself to school
This exhibition, which is another of the festival's teaching projects, will feature works by ninth-grade students at the Collège des Célestins produced under the supervision of the festival's mediator team, on the theme of "the seamy side of décor".