Free rein for ESAD students

As part of its fall program, the Institut pour la photographie is offering new “carte blanche” opportunities to three art schools in the region.

The first was awarded to students at ESAD Amiens (Higher School of Art and Design), who developed a publishing project centered on photographer Bettina Rheims, whose archives are held by the Institut pour la photographie.

"This editorial project arose from a collaboration with the Institut pour la photographie, centered on the installation The Chapel by Bettina Rheims, which was presented in 2021.

Thanks to her donation of her entire archival collection to the Institut pour la photographie, we were able to work with the photographs, contact sheets, and handwritten notes associated with this project. We were also able to conduct an interview with Bettina Rheims, during which she shared her career path, her creative process, and her experience as a photographer during her collaborations with the American magazine Details , from 1994 to 1997. Bettina Rheims answered our questions and invited us to take whatever creative liberties we wanted to create, each of us, a publication: We were thus given the opportunity to retouch, crop, and recontextualize her photographs as much as we wished, to reappropriate the subject by framing it around different concepts.

We are pleased to share here today the results of this individual and collective effort, presented through 27 editorial pieces, 27 concepts, and thus 27 unique ways of responding to a single challenge: to imagine what the “book adaptation” of a resolutely immersive and ephemeral installation would look like. ”

ESAD students: Vincent Moineau, Julie Marcelin, Mathilde Gallopin, Lucile Delaval, Naomie Warnecke, Aliénor Mabire, Franck Hu, Loubna Friquet, Laure Szczesniak, Florian De Keizer, Nicolas Fernandez, Sarah Heerlein, Atea Porchez, Nadège Moullet, Maelle Cassagne, Seyoung Kim, Célia Chen, Katharina Sobotta…

Teacher: Patrick Paleta