Terenowe warsztaty fotografii nocnej z Gaelem Bonnefonem - warsztaty w języku angielskim

SENTIMENTAL PORTRAIT OF SOPOT / BORDER OF THE NIGHT

During this workshop, we will attempt to experiment with new approaches that are both documentary and personal. The aim will be to carry out a collective project while developing our personal practice. Participants will have to meet residents and places in Sopot in order to create an offbeat and subjective portrait of the town. Discussions and photoshoots will be at the heart of this day of photographic work, creating a collective and individual experience.

This workshop will be divided into 3 parts and will allow participants to develop their photographic work.

- First, after a group meeting, there will be a presentation of my pictures and approach.- Participants will take photographs during the beginning of the night to create an intimate, collective, and sensitive portrait of the city in Sopot.- During the following day, we will edit pictures with the participating photographers that will represent a collective vision of the city.

Required material: a digital camera / phone

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Gaël Bonnefon

http://gaelbonnefon.org/https://ddaoccitanie.org/fr/artistes/gael-bonnefon/oeuvres

STATEMENT :

Gaël Bonnefon's photography entails a questioning of the body and its commitment. Far from a conceptual or serial photography governed by a purpose and developed through a precise discourse, what his work holds at stake is founded in an abandonment to others and to the situations he crosses. Without calculation or premeditation, the body's implication, that of the gesture and of the eye, allows encounters, draws one onto hazardous and sometimes uneven paths, on whose twists and turns an image can suddenly appear.

Surrounded by childhood's landscapes, traversed by far away horizons and populated by bodies and faces, his photography develops a map of a world at once fantasized and real, where the triviality of existence stands alongside grace in a precarious and vital balance. Landscapes, situations, faces, movements are vivaciously caught and glitter at the heart of nights. They weave the stuff of the mundane, worked like a precious substance of inestimable value. This stuff is the shroud that covers up time, the other, the world, our feelings and memories but it is also a veil that is removed and that offers the gaze fragments of truth, capturing the shadows of fears, allowing promises of happiness.

At first brutal and declining, the substance of Gaël Bonnefon's photography is just like a gaze that fears being one day extinguished and that is always looking to be born again. In photography as in love, recoil and desire, tension and easement, repetition, wandering and rest, flight and pursuit. Here photography allows itself to be traversed by flashes of life, renewed forces, echoes of far-off kindnesses and lost joys. Its sings silently, lover of a thousand faces from which the thread of a single and same image is born, followed without relent, from the snowy peaks of childhood to the lost worlds of the present. (Michaël Blin) Translated from the French by Matilda Holloway

BIO :

Gaël Bonnefon graduated with highest honours from the Fine Arts School of Toulouse (Isdat) in 2008. He has exhibited at Villa Pérochon, at the Eté photographique in Lectoure, at the 104 in Paris during Jeune Création 2012, at Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d'Arles and at PhotoEspaña,at the Abattoirs Museum in Toulouse in 2014, at the Château d'Eau Gallery in 2012 and 2019 and in the Vitrine of Frac Île-de-France in 2020. His work is part of the collections of Frac Midi-Pyrénées, Château d'Eau gallery, Kulturamt in Dusseldorf and Kiyosato Museum in Japan ; he participated in Temps Zero projects Berlin, Braga, Rome, Bucarest, Groningen and Thessaloniki. He has also been granted artist's residencies in Germany, France and Israel. His book Elegy for the Mundane was published by lamaindonne editions in 2019, Même soleil in 2021 with Iikki books and Aux jours inoubliables with Sun/sun editions in 2022. A new book About decline is to be published with éditions de Juillet in 2026.

Gaël Bonnefon's practice mainly revolves around photography and video, and comes in the form of installations (video projections, artwork presented with soundtracks) or publications (monographs). The various ways in which his photographs manifest relate to as many ways of interpreting images and everyday life, which happen to be a recurring subject in his entire production. This ordinary world, these landscapes and portraits in which the body occupies a significant position, manifest through a form of transfiguration and ambivalence - the result of the artist's thorough involvement with the subjects of his photographs.The fragments of this narration are shaped through the artist's meticulous observation of reality, in which he hunts for details, captures atmospheres, builds visions and sparks amazement with a form of expression that is "at once sensitive, impulsive and controlled"