Le bonheur est dans l’image

In Harlem, a group of children launches into a race on a court marked out in chalk. In Glasgow, a child holds a pink bubble against a row of dark tenements. Made a year apart, the two photographs give children the foreground and leave the shape of the city plainly visible behind them.

The former abbey at Aniane reopened the chapel of its old penitentiary with this exhibition, following two years of restoration. Organised by the Communauté de communes Vallée de l’Hérault with Magnum Photos, the retrospective brought together more than ninety photographs. The selection followed Raymond Depardon from the assignments that took him around the world to the farms and small towns of France.

The summer programme also took the pictures outside the chapel. Journal de France, made with Claudine Nougaret, and Les Habitants were screened in the open air. They carried a question raised by the photographs into another medium: how long do you stay with someone to see or hear what brought you there?

Exhibition programme at the Abbaye d’Aniane