Standing on the beach, staring at the sea / Deauville / Youth

Collection

STANDING ON THE BEACH, STARING AT THE SEA

Grand Jury's Prize and Audience Award 2019 at the Festival Planche(s) Contact in Deauville.

A personal interpretation of how could be the Youthhood in Deauville. Project realized during a residence of creation.

Artistic curator : Laura Serani.

President of the jury : Sarah Moon

Exhibition at the Gallery Point de Vue

19.10.09 > 05.01.20

Standing on the beach, staring at the sea.

In spring 2019, I was part of the Tremplin Jeunes Talents selection of the Planche(s) Contact festival.
Within this framework, I benefited from a 3-week residency in Deauville to produce a photographic work on the town.

I had the idea of tackling the theme of youth and following a group of teenagers by proposing my feelings on what their life in Deauville could be like :
to bring out a certain idleness and general boredom.
From the first few walks around, Deauville seemed to me to be a seaside town with a high rate of second homes. In my opinion, this resulted in a deserted and
silent city out of season, almost ghostly. I was going to show this facet of the town, to transcribe this feeling of emptiness and expectation that transpires from
the place and that spills over onto the young people living there.

I think it is possible to spend one's adolescence in a gentle way, without falling into mawkishness. Life passes. We wait for it. A wait marked by accidental poetry,
by idle sensuality. During the residency, I did research on the colour palette to find the one that would most accurately convey my emotion. Here, the soft greys
of my shots refer to an in-between time, the border between childhood and adulthood. Young people bask in the shy sunshine, in a sensory quest for the other,
and for themselves. It is also the grey of winter, rainy and dull, of this faded bitumen by the sea.

This vision may be distorted, or far from their truth, but it is a bias that I wanted to develop. On this project, I didn't necessarily look for a truth, it's not a reportage
but more a personal and documentory work : my vision of youth (idealized, personal, as I imagine it) to tend towards a universal feeling, to recall our own
teenage stories.

I am sensitive to the universe of film directors such as Gus Van Sant, Hal Hartley or Jim Jarmush. I wanted to go in these directions: to scratch the veneer of
facades and reveal a certain roughness of feelings and human relationships. All the while keeping a poetry, letting strangeness arise if it is there, in counterpoint.

Last March 2019, during the first session of the residency, I met by chance a group of boys on the basketball court by the beach. They joined the project and so
I started to photograph them one afternoon...

The following images are taken from this immersion.

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