The ordinary, the common, the insignificant – there’s nothing more authentic and more rooted in our day-to-day lives. Often with minimal staging, photographers frame a dull moment, a bland gesture, a nondescript landscape. With their way of seeing, with the angle and the chosen treatment, they magnify the moment, poeticize the gesture, dramatize the landscape.
“For boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.”1
The theme selected for our 15th edition has its origins in a meeting with Kinuko Asano, director of the gallery Écho 119, and the decision to entrust her with the curatorship of an exhibition bringing together five Japanese artists for the 2024 edition.
Out of discussions with the artists, their proposals, and the omnipresence of the everyday in their work, this idea of Transcending the commonplace emerged, the theme of our 15th edition. Around that idea we assembled different bodies of work that are part of the “humanity of the moment,”2 a concept that makes the artist an observer, a researcher.
In “Esthétique de l’ordinaire” (The Esthetics of the Ordinary), André Rouillé describes “an art that defends the human values of life against the predominance of the abstract, the factitious, the virtual.”
This is what you’ll discover in Par-delà la brume (Beyond the Mist) by Robert Charlotte, which blends landscapes and portraits and tells a story of the stark contrast between the harshness of nature and the human resilience of the residents of the Gaspé’s north shore.
Chieko Shiraishi, a true virtuoso of the silver print, uses that technique to better enhance the images of her singular world, at once poetic and deeply introspective.
Catherine Beaudette for her part digs into the detritus of everyday life in abandoned places, borrowing from the methodologies of archeology, anthropology and natural history to create fascinating images.
Here’s an overview of the programming scheduled for this 15th edition of Rencontres – which promises to be everything but ordinary!
About Rencontres
An annual summertime event, Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie introduces the public to contemporary photographic creation, its language, its codes and its various esthetics through occupation of a particular region: the Gaspé Peninsula. There it presents a series of exhibitions and installations, public events conceived as a space for reflection and initiation, and a program of artist residencies and of exchanges with festivals in other countries. Detailed programming to come. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest information: click here.
1 Susan Sontag, On Photography.
2 Ibid.
Top image : Chieko Shiraishi