Photographic Festival: L'oeil Urbain

May 27 - July 4, 2021 in Corbeil-Essonnes, France

This Year's Theme: French Touch

L'OEil Urbain Festival explores themes related to new urban realities. This photographic festival - including the ninth edition will be held from May 27 to July 4, 2021 - has become an unmissable event on in France.

Ten exhibitions - all within walking distance from the RER station - are available in the form of a photographic journey through several places in the city, inside (Commanderie Saint-Jean, Municipal Art Gallery, Chantemerle media library) as well as outside (forecourt of the Town Hall, square Crété, rue du Trou-Patrix, kiosk at music, Tarterêts and Montconseil district).

Since the creation of the festival, a resident artist has been invited to share his vision of Corbeil-Essonnes. This photographer shares then his work at an exhibition dedicated to him at the festival the following year.

L'OEil Urbain photography festival exhibitions are all free entry.

Cochon, Itxassou, 2012 © Gabrielle Duplantier

After the sub-Saharan Africa and its unbelievably distant lands, here comes the time of going back near. The theme of this 9th edition of Urban Eye Festival is France and its territories. The context of the pandemic is unique in that it opens our eyes to our immediate surroundings and invites us to wonder about what makes France.

The vision of France by the Belgian photographer John Vink is that of the “terroir”, popular and reassuring, with the mention of the Tour de France; From Persan- Beaumont (Val d´Oise) by Denis Dailleux, passing through the North of France seen by Yohanne Lamoulère, the portraits and the stories that the photographers tell seem to evolve in a familiar setting, not so far from our urban outskirts. And yet...

However, what can we think of the ghostly and intimate silhouettes sketched in the Basque Country by Gabrielle Duplantier? What about the untamed poetry of Corentin Fohlen picturing his Uncle, in love with utopia? It is clear that photographers have a deep desire to shift our attention towards what happens off-screen, towards figures at the edge, and to make us discover the France of the invisible. This France, so close to us that you can't even look at it anymore; this France of Corbeil-Essonnes, with our 2020 resident Yan Morvan, as close as possible to the inhabitants, or that France, still so obviously changed by recent events, of Gilles Favier ; black & white images from the movie La Haine (Hate), that's him.

And yet, on a closer look, there are distant, even absent areas of our knowledge of France. Photographer Christophe Gin offers us a look into the heart of Guyana out of the spotlight. Disconnected from the laws of the Republic, the inland country is made up entirely of tropical forests and villages cut off from the world and faces unemployment and misery of indigenous people. They are the forgotten people of the Republic. Morgan Fache evokes another France, that of Mayotte, who faced in 2018 a large-scale social conflict. He puts to the forefront, with harsh light, inequalities between this French department and the mainland. So again from Hugo Ribes's series of images taken on the Reunion Island, depicting according to its author, hidden or marginal territories...

Witnesses of a composite, colorful and surprising country, the photographers choose to move away from the picturesque to reveal to us the unknown territories, including cracks and aberrations. So familiar and full of strangeness, insolent and shaggy, the France of 2021 is not as we have fantasized; neither a moderator of elegance nor a country of human rights.

Which doesn't prevent France from being beautiful.

Persan-Beaumont © Denis Dailleux / Agence VU'

Exhibitions:
Yan Morvan, Ceux de Corbeil - Résidence photographique à Corbeil-Essonnes
Denis Dailleux, Années 90, de mon village à Persan
Christophe Gin, Colonie
Yohanne Lamoulère, Nord
John Vink, Tour de France 1985
Gilles Favier, Jusqu'ici tout va bien... 25 ans après le film La Haine
Gabrielle Duplantier, Pays basque
Morgan Fache, 101ème département
Hugo Ribes, Le Grand Chemin
Corentin Fohlen, Mon oncle (... est un génie)
Musée français de la Photographie, La vie en pages, Albums de famille, 1880-1980

Exclusive Interview with Denis Dailleux

Camopi © Christophe Gin

25 years after the movie 'La Haine' © Gilles Favier

Mayotte 2018 © Morgan Fache

Trinité, Bruay-la-Buissière, 2020 © Yohanne Lamoulère / Tendance Floue

Ftimata © Yan Morvan

Morzine 1985 Tour de France' © John Vink / Agence MAPS

Michael Joseph: Lost & Found

By Michael Joseph

Publisher : Kehrer Verlag

2024 | 144 pages

Lost & Found documents a contemporary American subculture of young Travelers through raw, striking portraiture and intimate storytelling. These Travelers abandon home to move around the country by hitchhiking and freight train hopping in a nomadic, transient existence outside of mainstream society. Along their personal journey driven by wanderlust, escapism, or a search for transient jobs, they find a new family in their traveling friends.

The high of freedom, however, does not come without consequence. The black and white portraits are made in public, on the street, using natural light. Individual stories, as a collection, form a greater narrative. Over ten years in the making, Joseph’s portraits reveal the human condition. They capture courage, tenderness, and determination in his subjects that have been largely ignored and unseen.

An incredible book that we highly recommend! All About Photo

All About Michael Joseph

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now

By Pauline Vermare

Publisher : Aperture

2024 | 440 pages

I’m So Happy You Are Here presents a much-needed counterpoint, complement, and challenge to historical precedents and the established canon of Japanese photography. This restorative history presents a wide range of photographic approaches brought to bear on the lived experiences and perspectives of women in Japanese society. Editors Pauline Vermare and Lesley A. Martin, curator and writer Takeuchi Mariko, and photo-historians Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick provide a critical historical and contemporary framework for understanding the work in three richly illustrated essays. Additional context is provided by an in-depth illustrated bibliography by Marc Feustel and Russet Lederman, and a selection of key critical writings from leading Japanese curators, critics, and historians such as Kasahara Michiko, Fuku Noriko, and others, many of which will be published in translation for the first time. While this book does not claim to be fully comprehensive or encyclopedic, its goal is to provide a solid foundation for a more thorough conversation about the contributions of Japanese women to photography—and an indispensable resource for anyone interested in a more robust history of Japanese photography.

Lisa McCord: Rotan Switch

By Lisa McCord

Publisher : Kehrer Verlag

2024 | 204 pages

Rotan Switch is the first monograph by Lisa McCord, documenting life on her grandparents’ cotton farm in the Arkansas Delta community of Rotan. It takes its name from the community’s central landmark—the railroad switch where farmers loaded their cotton bales onto trains headed out of the Delta. Although it hasn’t been used in years, it remains a potent symbol of the complex intersections of industry and agriculture, of race and injustice. Collected over the last forty-four years, these images and stories are a reflection on the people and places that have taught McCord the meaning of the word home. It is also a self-exploration into her inherently complicated role in this community as both the photographer and the granddaughter of the farm owner.
This publication is a long-term project, constructed from McCord's analog photographs, family snapshots and ephemera. Including, monochrome photographs, color polaroids, and recipes.

All About Lisa McCord

João Pina: Tarrafal

By João Pina

Publisher : GOST Books

2024 | 284 pages

João Pina draws upon his family history to tell the story of the Portuguese concentration camp at Tarrafal, Cape Verde which operated between 1936 and 1974. The visual history of the camp is told through the only known photographs taken inside the Tarrafal camp, combined with correspondence, archives, objects and Pina’s own contemporary photographs. Collectively these materials create a new dialogue about the Portuguese fascist regime of the past—and the resistance to it—on the 50th anniversary of its demise. In 1949, Pina’s grandfather Guilherme da Costa Carvalho—a young communist militant— was sent to the camp. Later that year Guilherme’s parents were granted unprecedented permission to visit their son and using a Rolleiflex camera they photographed all the living prisoners and the graves of the ones who had died in the camp. This extensive visual record—the only one ever made inside the concentration camp—was created with the intent of reporting back to the families of the other prisoners held in the camp or had died there. Seventy years later, in 2019, Pina began investigating a box in his family archive containing the negatives, contact sheets, vintage prints of these pictures made inside the camp, along with related letters and telegrams sent from his grandfather.

Photographic Festival: L'oeil Urbain

May 27 - July 4, 2021 in Corbeil-Essonnes, France

This Year's Theme: French Touch

Festival Website

Selected Books