The Old Normans

THE BEACH, in front of the Viewpoint

Normandy is home to some of the oldest trees in France. These old gentlemen are the guardians of our History, the symbols of our communes. They are centenarians, sometimes thousands of years old and have been marked by life in their flesh. They are symbols of wisdom, longevity, boldness and serenity. Standing at the foot of the tree, observing it, imposes silence, forces us to think about what opposes the ephemeral and the lasting, to confront a temporality that is not that of man. To make their portrait is to tame their mysteries and our past.

Networks :

Site : www.charlottebovy.com
Website of the foundation: www.fondationphoto4food.com

Theo & Salome

GRAND BASSIN - Adjacent to Place Claude Lelouch, in front of the municipal tennis court (PLEIN AIR)

Launched in a new chapter of his portrait of the "human condition", always situated between choices and destinies, Lorenzo Castore tells here the daily life and hopes of a young couple in love.

Lorenzo Castore spent several weeks in symbiosis with Théo and Salomé, two young lovers of eighteen years old, who live between Caen and Trouville, and then he maintained a long-distance relationship that allowed him to finalize his project. During the period of his residence in June he lived with them every moment of their day, to tell in direct contact and without pause their reality and punctually that of their families, on a limited but absolute duration.

Theo and Salome, at the centre of the project, are two young people who are "normal and ordinary", in the best sense of the word. They live their lives together and together they try to project themselves into a possible tomorrow.

Produced in black and white and in colour, this deep and sensitive work is enriched by texts by Theo and Salomé, which intervene directly on the images.

I wanted to make a work open to the future, against the cynicism and lack of perspective of many young people today. I would like this peripheral normality to inspire potentiality and dreams, managing to transform the banal into the exceptional.

Lorenzo Castore

The site:www.lorenzocastore.com

Magic hour

SMALL BASIN Rue de la Mer, in front of the Olympic Swimming Pool.

Evangelia Kranioti offers unexpected portraits and unusual stagings, echoing her world, sometimes baroque, often mysterious.

Evangelia Kranioti is a Greek artist and director living in France. She studied law (National University of Athens), visual arts (École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs de Paris) and cinema (Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains, Atelier Scénario de La Fémis). His work encompasses photography, video and installation.

Deauville and the Norman territory are virgin places because they are totally new to me, at the antipodes of those where I usually choose to photograph. The privileged context of the Festival Planches Contact's residency allowed me, after several long-term projects, to serenely explore my creative process, out of emergency. It is almost a challenge that I threw myself, around a "neutral" subject, with the only constraint being to bring out a world of my own, in a territory that is not my own. Evangelia Kranioti

Instagram: @evangeliakranioti

The game is another

HOTEL NORMANDY BARRIERE (Hall of the Hotel) AND SQUARE FRANCOIS ANDRE 38 rue Jean Mermoz - 14800 Deauville

During his residencies, Nikos Aliagas invested Deauville like a whirlwind, with his enthusiasm, his curiosity and his photographic work turned towards others.

Deauville and its region on the edge of the horizon. I observe the mysterious symmetry of the place, everything seems to have its place, in a protective space-time, as a kind of resistance to the natural elements. Between dunes of a day and masks of misfortune, I cross the faces of those who walk carefully on the boards, they now move forward without contact. (…)

The "game" is another, and there is something unreal about these superimposed slices of life in the decor. I like the cinematic atmosphere that Normandy naturally imposes, even the man serving you a glass of champagne in the palace looks like he's straight out of a movie. At the Casino we don't play anymore, we wait for it to pass. You don't know if the story ends or if it (re)begins, you don't know who's the protagonist and who's the extra. In this period of time where each sequence is suspended, we learn to live with our solitude again.

Nikos Aliagas

Being yourself is the best revolution

EMBARCADERE - Quai des Yachts

In the course of his encounters, Mathias Depardon draws a portrait of youth in Deauville, in that strange and subtle in-between, between the end of confinement and the beginning of de-confinement.

A brilliant photo-journalist, Mathias Depardon has developed a documentary approach. Winner in 2019 of the Regards du Grand Paris (Ateliers Médicis and Cnap), he works on the territory with an often sociological approach, both for the international magazine press and for public commissions.

In Deauville, he continued his reporting work on France confined initiated for Libération, from Paris to Menton following the Nationale 7. He continued in Normandy, from mid-May, this journey on a "de-confined" France, focusing on young people, their return "outside", their way of sharing these moments of regained freedom, with the city and the beach as a backdrop.

To meet a youth that has come out of two months of confinement. Torn between their need for freedom, often defying authority and the demands of school, the teenagers experienced the ordeal of confinement with emotions and priorities specific to their age. The conditions of confinement were unequal among the young people, affecting their mental health in some cases. Some adolescents experienced stress and anxiety, while others developed more social and supportive behaviours.

The size of the home, the availability of parents or access to the Internet influenced the way adolescents experienced confinement. This crisis is therefore once again indicative of social inequalities. Young people who have been affected by the health crisis and do not clearly perceive the prospects for the future. For the majority of them, maintaining environmental objectives must be the government's priority in the coming months. The paradigm shift of the new generations, prey to eco-anxiety, is once again being heard.

After several months of passivity, they are once again experiencing a certain form of autonomy and freedom. They come to find themselves with candour and closeness on the Normandy coast to perceive a horizon on a still uncertain future.

www.mathiasdepardon.com

And then there were the birds

THE VIEWPOINT (Salle Parquet) - Place des Six Fusillés, at the corner of Boulevard de la Mer and Rue Tristan Bernard, next to the Olympic swimming pool

Arriving in February in Deauville and returning to San Francisco just before confinement, filled with the northern lights in winter, Todd Hido sublimated landscapes and young women, always in the footsteps of memories and primitive images.

Todd Hido, an American photographer born in 1968, pursues during his long journeys the search for images that relate to his own memories. With a very particular use of colour, Todd HIDO suggests an instability behind the appearance of the landscapes and situations he photographs. Author of several books, his images are in the collections of important American museums; he is represented in Paris by the prestigious gallery Les Filles du Calvaire. During his residency in Deauville, he surveyed the Norman countryside and staged models in a particular light, inspired by that of the painters of the North and Flemish painting.

When I was asked to participate in Planches Contact, I immediately seized the opportunity. I had already visited the Normandy region because I had seen images that made me want to take pictures there. During my recent stay in February, to take pictures for the festival, it was really wonderful to benefit from the assistance and advice of the locals to guide me to places that I would not have been able to discover if I had been alone. But as with all photography, what you stumble upon by chance is often what you were looking for - except that you didn't know it until you saw it. I often try to visit new places in the winter because I like this inclement weather, and the gusts of wind from the English Channel have never disappointed me. I have found a dark and mysterious atmosphere that suits the one I try to capture in my photographs. And then there were the birds - which I have always hunted with my camera but, in a way, only at Deauville, they merged into the right composition.

Todd Hido

The site:www.toddhido.com

Big kisses from the Côte Fleurie

BOARD BEACH CABINS, OLYMPIC SWIMMING POOL (OUTDOOR)

Funny and iconoclastic observer of society, the Riverboom collective returns this year with a post-confinement surprise spot: "Big kisses from the Côte Fleurie", to be discovered with the festival?

After a remarkable visit to Deauville in 2019, Riverboom, a group of Swiss Italian photographers and journalists, returns this year with a wink of the eye in the same spirit of benevolent provocation.

The project was born towards the end of the Covid virus period, when everyone stayed locked up at home and contact between people was practically nil. In Deauville was shot Claude Lelouch's famous film Un homme, une femme, whose emblematic poster illustrates a passionate kiss between the two protagonists, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée. To all the passionate kisses that have been exchanged on the French coasts, to lovers of all ages, nationalities and sexual preferences, is dedicated the Riverboom project "Gros Bisous", commissioned by the Festival Planches Contact.

Taken with a light that reminds us of the cinematographic atmosphere, the kisses of the protagonists of the Riverboom collective's photographs seem to remind us that love never stops. The cliché of a couple's kiss on the beach becomes an emblematic image of a period that we can hardly forget.

http://www.riverboom.com/

His successive disappearances

THE VIEWPOINT - Place des Six Fusillés, at the corner of Boulevard de la Mer and Rue Tristan Bernard, next to the Olympic swimming pool

Clara Chichin offers us a wandering made of dazzling, impressionist images. Visions sometimes on the threshold of abstraction - a mixture of mineral matter, the grain of the film and pixels. A composition of an imaginary space oscillating between minerality and vegetality, original fragments: water, sky, rock. A drift punctuated by long, solitary and intuitive walks, grappling with the elements and phenomena: sun, rain, gusts of wind, changing lights and colours. A photographic project where the experience of the landscape is lived as a crossing, an emotional experience.

Networks

Blog / site: http: //clarachichin.blogspot.com/
Research blog icono and texts: https: //ilyavaitdeuxsoleils.tumblr.com/
Instagram: clarachichin
Facebook: clara Chichin
Hans Lucas: http: //hanslucas.com/cchichin/photo

Of stones and blood

THE VIEWPOINT - Place des Six Fusillés, at the corner of Boulevard de la Mer and Rue Tristan Bernard, next to the Olympic swimming pool

Manon Renier has produced a series of self-portraits working on the intimate, the body, an introspective project dealing with complacency and self-questioning. Each image is made in a Norman landscape or urban context, in which her body is staged, sometimes simply or by playing on the possible contortions: folding, burying, twisting... Aesthetic and initiatory journey where she physically experiences her transformation into a mass, picked up, sculpted, moulded by the angle of view of her camera.

Networks:

Website : www.manonrenier.com
Instagram: reniermanon

Lippodrome

THE VIEWPOINT - Place des Six Fusillés, at the corner of Boulevard de la Mer and Rue Tristan Bernard, next to the Olympic swimming pool

Hugo Weber's project in Deauville is to tell the story behind the scenes of the equestrian world, with a focus on the people who make life in this world possible (workers, owners, bettors etc...), whether in an amateur or professional context.

Networks:

Instagram: hugo__weber
Website: https: //hugoweber.cargo.site/