Each year, from 2007 to 2010, the Festival d'Avignon invited a photographer to take a look at a Festival, to transform it into a subject to reveal it in a different way. Initiated with the Centre national des Arts plastics and its public commission system, this project successfully focused on the public, the actor, memory and set design.
François Hébel, director of the Rencontres d'Arles, decided to show two of these viewpoints this year: that of Frédéric Nauczyciel on the public and that of Stéphane Courturier on the architecture and sets of the Festival d'Avignon. The former did a large-format series in black and white titled Public (Those Who Look at Us), capturing the presence of the spectators and the duration of the performance. The latter created, in 2010, a large-format series titled Melting Point – Avignon, showing the metamorphosis of Avignon's venues, from the state of historic monuments to that of theatres, from rehearsal to performance.
Distribution
photographs by Stéphane Couturier and Frédéric Nauczyciel