La Gacilly - Un monde tout en couleurs
Raymond Depardon at La Prairie, Festival Photo La Gacilly
The exhibition at La Prairie
Two girls in matching yellow jumpers stand beneath a portrait of Che Guevara on the outskirts of Santiago. Nine years later, in Glasgow, a man leans out of a tenement window above a red car. At La Gacilly these photographs shared a walk through the trees. From a few steps away, the colour caught the eye. Up close, it was the people who held it.
For the exhibition, Simon Depardon selected colour photographs from his father’s archive. As a young reporter, Raymond Depardon often carried two cameras. He used black and white for the assignment and kept colour film in the second camera for a possible magazine cover. He continued to work in colour long after the assignment was over. In a photograph made in Franche-Comté in 2006, he takes in the whole front of a café, right down to the empty chairs on the pavement.
On assignment, in colour
The festival’s selection starts with a 1960 self-portrait in Paris. In Mexico City eight years later, the camera looks down across the lanes as the runners cross the line. At Parral in Chile, Raymond Depardon comes close enough to see the light on a man’s cheek beneath the brim of his hat. Both pictures were made on assignment. Seen together, they show how much he could change the distance between himself and his subject.
Glasgow, Harar, Texas
In Glasgow, three people wait against a red wall. In Harar, the walls are turquoise and the woman passing the doorway wears a headscarf. Nearly forty years separate the Glasgow photograph from the yellow storefront in El Paso. Simon Depardon drew the exhibition from hundreds of colour photographs in the archive. The open-air hang at La Prairie brought these distant places within a few steps of one another.
Photographs by Raymond Depardon.
Exhibition at Festival Photo La Gacilly
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