Planches Contact, the Deauville photography festival, is growing

Deauville (Calvados). Contact Boards is 15 years old. In the mapping of photography festivals, it is one of the rare ones to have been launched by a political figure and not by a photographer or an association. At the opening of the current edition, on October 18, Philippe Augier, mayor of the town of Deauville, recalled the reasons which led him to initiate its creation in 2010: “All the great photographers passed through Deauville, and none of their photographs appear in its collections. » Bettina Rheims introduced him to Patrick Rémy, exhibition curator and author of photo books. For five years, the latter was the artistic director of the festival which, from its first edition, relied solely on the work of photographers invited in residence to offer a look at Deauville. This results in around ten exhibitions each year, devoted both to students from European photo schools and to renowned photographers such as Sarah Moon, Massimo Vitali, David Armstrong, Rinko Kawauchi and Philippe Ramette. This is how, over the course of several editions, a photophilic collection was formed.

A field of investigation extended to all of Normandy

Philippe Normand, cultural manager of the City, succeeded Patrick Rémy before Laura Serani took over the management of the festival in 2019 with the mission of giving it another dimension. Since then, the former director of Fnac’s photo galleries, then artistic director of festivals in Italy, Paris or Bamako (Mali), has structured and developed Planches Contact by expanding the programming and photographer residencies, including the territory of The investigation is now extended to all of Normandy.

The number of invited artists has also increased with the participation of the Photo4food foundation in financing some of these residencies. The profile of residents has diversified, and the inauguration, in May 2021, of the Franciscans [lire l’encadré] gave the festival the quality exhibition spaces it lacked, while the amount of the overall budget (500,000 euros), financed mainly by the City, increased in parallel with the arrival of new partners.

The 2024 edition reflects the work of photographers invited to deepen their research or develop new ones, and their exhibition, half of them organized outside, extends this year to other districts of the city. Among the twenty resident works on the program, the delicate vision of the fauna and flora of the foreshores by Cloé Harent is particularly attractive; the fiction with a Rohmerian atmosphere of summer days spent in Deauville by a young girl in a red swimsuit (Maximilien Schaeffer); and Bettina Pittaluga’s portraits of people in bed, expressing in a single image what the bed means to them.

Coco Amardeil’s playful “Norman ABC” enchants with its freshness imbued with humor and tangy colors. While Sophie Alyz’s evocation of coastal erosion is embodied in pictorial images of landscapes of the Normandy coast with velvety blur and relief worked in the print.

From Normandy to Nigeria

Rachel Seidu’s questions about the life of LGBTQ+ people in Normandy compared to that of sexual minorities in Lagos, her hometown in Nigeria, form an interweaving of portraits and scenes of great gentleness. Éric Bouvet, based on the question asked to the people photographed: “What does it mean to be French?” », he develops a series of portraits.

Dominique Issermann chose to exhibit on the beach [voir illustration]in a scenography which brings together a selection of around ten portraits, fashion photographs and landscapes. His images, of great beauty, demonstrate a fictional power. Its exhibition is not part of a residency, just like the one presented at the Franciscaines, “The Century of Vacations”, a theme chosen by Laura Serani to reveal around a hundred images from the Fnac collection created between 1978 and the start of the year 2010.