プレスリリース 4 June to 30 September 2016 PRESS KIT

13TH EDITION Japan – The Oceans プレスリリース 4 June to 30 September 2016 PRESS KIT

EDITORIALS p. 4 Jacques Rocher p. 4 Auguste Coudray p. 6 Cyril Drouhet, Florence Drouhet

JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY p.10 Guimet Museum p.11 University of Tokyo Museum and university of Lyon p.12 Motoki p.13 Takeyoshi Tanuma p.14 Hiromi Tsuchida p.15 Yukio Ohyama p.16 Kazuma Obara p.17 Takashi Arai p.18 Miho Kajioka p.19 Kiiro p.20 Eriko Koga p.21 Lucille Reyboz p.22 Yoshinori Mizutani p.23 Sohei Nishino p.24 Shoji Ueda

THE OCEANS p.26 Paul Nicklen p.27 Daniel Beltrá p.28 Pierre Gleizes p.29 Daesung Lee p.30 Shiho Fukada p.31 Olivier Jobard p.32 Guillaume Herbaut p.33 Anita Conti p.34 Benjamin Deroche and Jean-François Spricigo p.35 Emerging photography p.36 Morbihan photography festival for secondary school pupils p.36 IMAGE SANS FRONTIÈRE collective

ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES p.38 Pascal Maitre p.39 Lianne Milton p.40 Japan as seen by ARTE p.40 Contacts JACQUES ROCHER Festival Founder & Mayor of La Gacilly La Gacilly, a village in images How can a mere village speak to the rest of the world? Why should a village of just 2,200 people be welcoming more than 300,000 visitors each year? These are the sort of questions people ask when they hear reports of the Festival Photo La Gacilly. The answers are simple: - the editorial team, - the quality of the subjects presented, - the harmony between landscape and photographs, - the accessibility of the culture on offer. These are the structural factors that ensure the Festival’s success. In recent years, the Festival Photo La Gacilly has become a key event in enhancing the power of attraction of Brittany, the Morbihan department and the La Gacilly area. It has given a real boost to the local economy. Thanks to its diversity, photography is therefore a vector of local development, bringing positive energies together for the benefit of the local community. The success of a festival of this kind is based on an “alchemy of the possible”, drawing on the support of our partners in the public and private sectors, as well as the teams of artists and technicians involved. I would like to thank all the photographers who have exhibited their work over these 13 years: through their eyes, we are discovering a whole world out there − a world to love and protect.

AUGUSTE COUDRAY Festival President The Festival Photo La Gacilly is entering its 13th year. Over time, it has become France’s largest outdoor photography festival, welcoming more than 300,000 visitors each year. For the Morbihan department and the Brittany region, it is a cultural event of structural significance: more than a purely local celebration of photography, it has put La Gacilly-Photo on the map as a destination of national, and indeed international, interest. It is an excellent illustration of the attraction that can be exercised by art, contributing to the global influence of a local area, enabling it to stand out from the crowd, draw people in and establish a unique personality. Thanks to its character and commitment to promoting an ethical form of photography related to the environmental issues of the 21st century, the festival fosters sustainable management and intelligent local development, based on a shared vision and ambition, and, above all, common sense. It makes for greater cohesion among all the actors and visitors it brings together, mobilises and motivates. It creates a sense of belonging and invites people to work for positive outcomes. It is possible to build a different world; change is on the way. Let us give room, time and visibility to those who inform, challenge and encourage us, those who create, innovate, think and build the world of tomorrow in a spirit of respect and solidarity. Let us dare to think big and beautiful, to aim for utopia! Let us be bold with our photography! Enjoy the festival!

4 LA GACILLY PHOTOGRAPHY AT THE HEART OF NATURE

5 CYRIL DROUHET Curator FLORENCE DROUHET Artistic Director

Japan, land of photography… …the oceans, nature under threat

人生は風前の灯火の如し “ Life is a candle in the wind” (Japanese proverb)

For the 2016 Festival de La Gacilly, we will be continuing our practice of highlighting a country of great photographic vitality and examining an issue bound up with our commitment to the environment, in the hope that mankind and the Earth can arrive at a sustainable relationship. Japan? The Oceans? Two subjects which, as we will see, taken together, answer many of our questions, many of our concerns about the world we will be leaving to our children and to future generations.

A tribute to Japanese photography This year, we will be marking the fifth anniversary of a tragic event. Maybe you remember... On Friday 11 March 2011, an earthquake shook the Japanese archipelago, followed a few minutes later by a tsunami which swept away everything in its path. The Fukushima nuclear power station exploded, a major accident that had devastating consequences for Japan, and indeed the rest of the planet. It is a sad irony that it is now 70 years since Japan experienced the destructive power unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: two atomic bombs which, it is true, brought an end to the Second World War, but also to the whole order of Japanese society. These catastrophes profoundly influenced the work and aesthetic sensitivity of Japanese artists. We therefore thought it vitally important to focus on Japanese photography, too often associated with the photographic industry and global companies such as Canon, Nikon and Fuji. To date, no festival held in France has exhaustively featured the photographic art of this country of 127 million people. Let this not be seen as negligence on the part of Western nations, still less as due to a belief that Japanese photography is of only secondary interest. On the contrary. The reason is without doubt that Japanese society, codes of behaviour and culture are poles apart from our own aesthetic and moral principles. Japan is an island, and it is precisely its insularity that determines its singular character. We know so little about its photography, and yet it teems with highly regarded exponents of the art who, whether or not they have made a name for themselves abroad, stand out on account of their documentary and artistic work, and their rare creativity. It may be difficult to sum up the spirit of Japanese photographers over the years, but one thing is clear: they avoid anything showy, they are more concerned with framing and constructing an image than with emotion, they have a real feeling for light in all its forms, and they aim for a certain kind of beauty and heightened realism.

La Gacilly in Japanese mode In this its 13th Festival year, La Gacilly will be transformed for one summer season into a Japanese village. A number of toriis (porticos marking the entrance to Shinto shrines) will be erected in our narrow lanes, zen gardens will be laid out in our open-air galleries, and our streets will be decorated with kakemonos (large scrolls) displaying large-format prints telling the story of Japanese photography. 1868 saw the beginning of the Meiji era, when Japan reluctantly opened its doors after two centuries of isolation. At much the same time, photography was born. With support from the Musée Guimet, a fine institution working to promote knowledge of Asian civilisations, we will be presenting images of another age, of a society that had not yet crossed the threshold of modernity. This was the time of the last samurai, the warrior caste that ruled feudal Japan, and also of the tea ceremony, when kimonos, calligraphy and flower arrangements were all part of a lost art of living. When, in 1945, Emperor Hirohito addressed his subjects directly for the first time in a radio broadcast, it was to accept the surrender of his country to the United States, and to renounce his divine status − an event which came as a traumatic shock to a population already weakened by war. The Japanese submitted to American occupation and culture; one world had crumbled to make way for another. Takeyoshi Tanuma has recorded this social upheaval for posterity in his photo-reportage. Strongly influenced by Cartier-Bresson, he shows a people undergoing reconstruction: women in

6 traditional dress rubbing shoulders with those who were adopting Western fashions, the first industrial developments, and young people trying to free themselves from stifling convention. We will also be featuring a great heritage photographer: Shoji Ueda, who died at the very end of the last century. He has left us with poetic images which could be straight out of an Ozu film, reflecting his minimalism and predilection for Magritte-type settings. Another key exponent of Japanese photography is Hiromi Tsuchida. Now represented in the world’s leading museums, Tsuchida spent the 1980s and 1990s focusing on the ubiquitous crowds that throng all parts of the archipelago, in which individuals are disappeared into the multitude. He captured these “grains of sand”, as he called them, swept up into our standardised society characterised by frenetic urbanisation and the proliferation of leisure activities. Motoki, for her part, turns her attention to a quintessentially Japanese activity, more a sacred art than sport: sumo, which she has glorified in black and white, poetically conveying the supple body movements of the wrestlers. The fact is that, as a result of the Fukushima catastrophe, in which the wrath of nature was unleashed, the Japanese have discovered the limits of human ability to control the elements. Five years on, the nightmare is still not over. Every day, water seeps into the basements of the nuclear facilities and mixes with the heavily contaminated cooling water, an invisible pollution now equivalent to the contents of more than 300 Olympic swimming pools. 120,000 people have been evacuated and many of these refugees are still living in temporary accommodation. But above all, more than 50 million cubic metres of radioactive waste has accumulated, and no one knows how to put a stop to the contamination. Japanese photographers living through this tragic event are conveying it in pictures. We will be presenting three exhibitions which bear witness to this awful tragedy, featuring three authors with very different styles. Kazuma Obara, a young photojournalist, was one of the first on the scene at Fukushima. Will the nuclear catastrophe bring humanity to its senses? This is the question he asks in these photographs of a devastated region and the victims he encountered. Takashi Arai, meanwhile, has used the daguerreotype technique to emphasise the drama of the event: his images, bathed in an unusual bluish light, seem burned and irradiated, and we sense in this chaos nature asserting its rights, individuals who may or may not still be among us, heaps of fallen metal, forgotten by all. Miho Kajioka, finally, takes a very personal, very intimate look at the catastrophe: in his overexposed, washed out visuals with their blurred outlines, we can faintly make out landscapes and ghostly individuals. There is no doubt that Fukushima was a watershed. The younger generation of artists has been profoundly affected by it, their creativity set free. Our aim has been to bring together, compare and contrast these new styles in a single place, in a plant maze where, as the light changes throughout the day, as the wind blows through the trees and shadows caress the photographs, the visitor will be able to wander through a space devoted to these up-and-coming photographers. As if in an immense aviary, we will be able to enjoy the budgerigars of Yoshinori Mizutani with their vivid, saturated colours. Then we will pass through the flower garden created byKiro , an artist attempting to reproduce his own inner vision of nature, whose photomontages tend to abstraction. We will have a rest in the peace of Japan’s water sources in the work of Lucille Reyboz, the most Japanese of French photographers, who has been living in Kyoto for the last ten years. Next we will tumble into the opaque world of Eriko Koga, prize-winner at the 2015 Kyotographie Festival, who explores the intimacy of sacred temples and the vagaries of nature. Finally, we will come to the urbanised Tokyo of Sohei Nishino, whose unique work is the fruit of a painstaking creative process: the photographer roams the city streets, develops his negatives, and then glues up the prints he has produced to form an immense diorama constituting a plan of the city.

Our struggle to preserve the oceans Japan, whose insularity has created a unique society both modern and traditional, is today a land bruised by the wrath of nature and the oceans. Oceans which, strangely, were almost absent from the discussions led by heads of state and government during the COP21 summit in Paris last Decem- ber. Be that as it may, the idea that we will be bequeathing this planet to our descendants tomorrow remains the primary concern of our Festival, and photography, the prism through which we aspire to spread enlightenment: to arouse a sense of wonder at the beauty of the images on display, while raising awareness of the reality revealed in them. Nowadays, we have a false view of the sea. We take from it the fish and seafood we enjoy without so much as a second thought. Since the ocean depths are invisible, we imagine them to be limitless. As we ruthlessly develop industrial fishing, and continue to exploit the seas without allowing marine life to regenerate, it is estimated that many species will have disappeared by 2050. A supporter of Greenpeace for almost thirty years, Pierre Gleizes has recorded many instances of overfishing: his hard-hitting images are worth more than a thousand words! An aggravating factor is the pollution caused by human activity, which is turning our seas into an enormous open-air waste tip. We are thinking, obviously, of the oil slicks caused by spills from oil tankers or accidents on drilling rigs. The

7 photographer Daniel Beltra has been to the Gulf of Mexico, returning with terrifying images whose strange twilit beauty give added force to the charges he brings against the perpetrators. Then there are toxic heavy metals such as mercury or rust that are washing up on the shores of developing countries. The photojournalist Shiho Fukada has lived alongside the slave labourers of Bangladesh who, working in conditions that should have been consigned to history, cut up the hulks of cargo ships and super tankers sent there by the Western world. Climate-related disasters are another consequence of human activity. The most obvious manifestation of this is the melting of the polar ice-caps and the consequent rise in sea levels: 17 cm in the course of the 20th century, it could reach a metre by 2100. Some island nations are already disappearing beneath the waves. The Korean photographer Daesung Lee bears witness to this tragedy with a gallery of portraits of the last inhabitants of Ghoramara, an island in Bay of Bengal, who will soon have to evacuate their island home. The melting of the polar ice-caps will result in the extinction of many species. For the prestigious National Geographic magazine, to which we pay tribute each year, the Canadian Paul Nicklen has specialised in the wildlife of these glacial regions. His stunning photographs of leopard seals, penguins and polar bears warn us that biodiversity is under threat. Our chief aim is not to come up with solutions but to sound an alarm bell, so no one will be able to plead ignorance of what is happening. The dedicated work of Olivier Jobard, who has focused on the issue of migration for more than ten years, is the most striking example of such awareness-raising. He has continued to bring to our attention the men, women and entire families who are leaving their homelands, taking sea routes into exile, to reach the maybe illusory Western Eldorado. Nor will we be neglecting the shores of Brittany, swept by the ocean winds and storms. This winter, with assistance from the Morbihan Departmental Authority, the documentary film-makerGuillaume Herbaut visited the islands of Houat and Hoëdic, pearls of the Atlantic Ocean, which revert to their wild island identity when the tourists and summer holidaymakers have left. We will also be paying a special tribute to Anna Conti, the “Lady of the sea”, who in the 1950s and 1960s shared the daily life of Breton fishermen in their long odysseys on the high seas: images from the past, steeped in a deep sense of the humanity of these seafaring folk. Finally, we will be introducing a multimedia work created by the artists Benjamin Deroche and Jean-François Spricigo during their recent period of residence at the lighthouse of Créach Ouessant.

A Festival devoted to environmental issues Once again, the Festival de la Gacilly will be presenting a blend of documentary, artistic and journa- listic material for the 350,000 visitors who faithfully attend each year. Once again, our rural area will be transformed into an art gallery as we stage a new crop of exhibitions. Once again, environmental issues will be our central concern and, thanks to support from the Fondation Yves Rocher, we will be hosting the work of two committed photojournalists. Pascal Maître, a magician with colour, will take us on a trip to the island of Madagascar, which he knows so well, symbolised by the baobab tree. Meanwhile, Lianne Milton, winner of the Fondation’s prize for photography in 2015, will be giving us an exclusive preview of her work in drought-ravaged Brazil, in particular the region of the Sertao, where no rain has fallen for almost five years. Finally, once again, we will be welcoming photography enthusiasts from all over the world, as well as secondary school pupils from the Morbihan region, all lovers of an art that has come to enshrine our humanity and our struggles. As this Festival is yours, we want to offer you the finest possible setting...

8 LA GACILLY A VILLAGE FULL OF PICTURES

9 JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY Japan and its traditions

The Guimet Museum was set up as part of a major project orchestrated by Lyon industria- list Émile Guimet (1836-1918) to create a museum dedicated to the religions of Egypt, Antiquity and Asia. Guimet had amassed large collections of objects during his travels to Egypt, Greece, and on his round-the-world trip in 1876, which included stopovers in Japan, China and India. He displayed these items in Lyon from 1879, before transferring them to a museum (inaugurated in 1889) that he had built for this purpose in Paris. Magnificently renovated in 1997 in line with advances in museology and new require- ments concerning the presentation and conservation of museum works, it is now one of Europe’s major centres of knowledge about Asian civilisations and has one of the most comprehensive collections of Asian art in the world.

Photographic collections The museum’s photographic archives naturally include copies of the museum’s works. But, most importantly, they hold a large collection of photographs, some of which date back to the very beginnings of photography. These ancient images show landscapes, architectural views and countless portraits and scenes from daily life, whose ethnogra- phic, social and historical value is undeniable. In addition, photographs from French archaeological missions in China (Édouard Chavannes, Paul Pelliot and Victor Segalen) and Afghanistan (Alfred Foucher, Joseph Hackin) provide information about the working conditions of archaeologists in the past, and show masterpieces being discovered for the very first time. As part of its partnership with the Guimet Museum and the Kyotographie Festival, La Gacilly Photo Festival will present a selection from The Last Samurai, First Photographs exhibition, which was presented in 2015 at Kyotographie, as well as from The Tea Road, an exhibition from the 2016 programme. Some of the prints on display come from the Benrido Collotype workshop in Kyoto, which is one of the last in the world to still perform collotype printing. Invented in France 150 years ago, this unique printing technique is at the crossroads between standard printing and photographic printing.

KYOTOGRAPHIE, an International Photography Festival set up by Lucille Reyboz and Yusuke Nakanishi, has taken place in Kyoto every spring since 2013. Staged over four weeks, the exhibitions feature original layouts and are spread out around the city in venues that combine traditional and contemporary architecture.

10 JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY Japan and its traditions

© Université de Lyon / The University of Tokyo Mobilemuseum UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO MUSEUM AND UNIVERSITY OF LYON Jadis le Japon, regards figés par l’Occident (The Japan of yesteryear, in the fixed view of Westerners)

The photographic exhibition Jadis le Japon, regards figés par l’Occident presents an exceptional series of portraits of Japanese men and women, dating from the time of the first diplomatic exchanges between Europe and the Land of the Rising Sun. At the end of the shogunate, with the Meiji Restoration in its early stages, Japan was still an isolated archipelago, a land of tradition which fascinated Westerners committed to the path of industrial modernity. In their snapshots and travel writings, these visitors tried to fix the image of a world populated by samurai, geishas, emperors and empresses. Their photographs feature people of all ages, from children to the elderly, and of the different classes of this traditional society. Alongside the Emperor and Empress, of divine status at that time, we see the Shogun Tokugawa and his younger brother, members of the ruling warrior class, as well as noblemen, officials and emissaries sent to France to represent the shogun’s government. Women, members of the anonymous urban population, are also represented: hotel- keepers, geishas, prostitutes and other members of the red-light districts. As they posed for the camera, a device previously unknown to them, these Japanese were undoubtedly facing up to a Western civilisation that had broken into and disrupted their world. Where Westerners were concerned, it was through these photographs that they formed a very stereotyped image of Japan at the time of the Meiji Restoration, populated by emperors, shoguns, samurai, musumes and geishas. As representatives of a country viewed from the outside, and despite the artifice involved in posing for photographs, between projecting and capturing images, these Japanese children, adults and old people have been gazing out on us since 1860, at the dawning of the colonial era, calling into question our behaviour as tourists and our mania for documentation.

Exhibition organised to mark the 150th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Switzerland and Japan, produced by the University of Tokyo Museum (UMUT) in collaboration with the University of Lyon, co-produced by the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the Geneva Municipal Authority. Production: University of Tokyo Museum (UMUT) and University of Lyon Curator: Yoshiaki Nishino (Director, UMUT) Graphic design: UMUT Works (Yoshiaki Nishino+Hiroyuki Sekioka) Christian Polak Collection

11 JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY Japan and its traditions

“Once every year, a traditional sumo wrestling tournament is held at the Yasukunijinja Shrine in honour of the gods. In May 2014, I attended the event. It was the first time I had witnessed a tournament of this kind. I found it difficult to watch these bouts. Silent and inexpressive, the wrestlers seemed to me inhuman. There was something sacred, mystical about their clashing, naked bodies. I tried to express, through the medium of photography, the feeling I experienced of the divine presence.” Motoki

Motoki’s life and career has been anything but ordinary. Having raised two children on her own, at the age of 40 she qualified as a patent lawyer. In her free time, she took photographs of university baseball matches, made trips to Aomori to photograph fighting dogs, and then ventured farther afield, throughout Asia, capturing images of birds and wild dogs for posterity. As one interested in her personal history, I suppose that Motoki deliberately chose out-of-the-way places to perfect her craft. Alternating her role as mother with those of lawyer and photographer, Motoki’s passion for photography grew, as if she had always been waiting for this stage of her life to begin. If each of us had inside ourselves a vessel propelling us forward, and these vessels were visible, I would really like to see Motoki’s. Honing her skills, focusing on her passion, moving forward day by day, photographer Motoki’s vessel must certainly have a very deep draught. Seiji Komatsu, director of the EMON Gallery Born in 1961 in the region of Niigata, MOTOKI graduated in physical sciences from the University of Tokyo. In 2013, she exhibited her “Nora inu” series at the Japan Center of Photography Graduation Exhibition and at the iia Gallery, then, in 2014, her “Sumo” series at the Emon Gallery and at Fotofever in Paris. Also in 2013, she was awarded the Onaeba vol12 Yokohama Prize, and in 2015 her book “White Fang” won second prize at the Fotobook Festival in Kassel.

12 JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY Post-war

When, on 15 August 1945, the Japanese heard the voice of their emperor Hirohito for the very first time, speaking on the radio, a further period of enormous upheavals began, similar in scope to that ushered in 85 years earlier by the Meiji Revolution. An old world, a whole country, had crumbled away; a new society had to be constructed. Photography was the ideal medium for recording this waking nightmare. Photographers set aside the filters they had used to disguise reality, the filter of chocolate-box beauty or the filter of propaganda, and plunged into raw reality, to convey an image of Japan without make-up. Inspired by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, in the 1950s Takeyoshi Tanuma immortalised this shift from tradition to modernism, recording street scenes which owe their impact to the aesthetic of the “decisive moment”. He recorded a Japan in search of its identity, a changing urban population, young people adopting a deliberately Western lifestyle that prefigured the economic power about to arise, but a Japan still holding on to its own codes of behaviour and never denying its cultural heritage. Born in Tokyo in 1929, Takeyoshi Tanuma graduated from the Faculty of Photography in 1949, before joining the team at Sun News Photos. From 1953, he was the official photographer of the Shinchosha publishing house and also published his work in many magazines, including Geijutsu Shincho, which commissioned from him portraits of many major Japanese artists. From 1965 to 1972, he worked for Time Life, which tasked him with taking photographs of children in all parts of the world. Over a period of 40 years, Tanuma has visited more than 120 countries exploring the subject of childhood, his favourite theme and the basis of his life’s work. For more than ten years from 1995, he was President of the Japanese Society of Professional Photographers. In 2004, a major retrospective of his work was held in Tokyo, at the Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

13 JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY Population and landscapes

Japan, equivalent in area to California, is now home to 127 million people. Its population density of 340 inhabitants/km2 is one of the highest in the world. It is true that the population has begun to decrease, with a falling birth rate and life-expectancy figures unequalled in any other country: 86 for women, 79 in the case of men. The thing that first strikes a traveller arriving in the archipelago is the crowds of people, in any town you visit. It was crowds that fascinated Hiromi Tsuchida in the early 1980s, when he captured them in photographs characterised by saturated, almost unreal colours, though none of his images were in any way doctored or staged. He saw each individual as a grain of sand, and he tried to understand the social structure of his country through his view-camera work on the dynamics of the crowd, at festivals, during leisure time and at sporting events, always in the flow of daily life. People fitted in with the group, always sticking to the principle of never stepping out of line, never deviating from social convention. He also observed the birth of modern Japan: the fragmentation of the family, the rise of materialism, measured in terms of the way the crowd was structured. Born in 1939 in Fukui, Hiromi Tsuchida began his career as an engineer, before turning to photography in 1971. In 1978, he was awarded the Ina Nobuo Prize for his work on Hiroshima and the consequences of the atomic bomb. In parallel, he developed an artistic sensitivity which has made him a key figure on the Japanese photographic scene. In 2007, a retrospective entitled “Hiromi Tsuchida’s Japan” was organised at the Metropolitan Museum in Tokyo, at which he was awarded the Domon Ken Prize, the highest distinction for a Japanese photographer. His works are now on display at the MOMA in New York, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

14 JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY Population and landscapes

Mount Fuji is the symbol of Japan, its 3,776-metre summit, the country’s highest point, visible in clear weather from the city of Tokyo, 100 kilometres to the north east. It has been a source of fascination since ancient times, omnipresent in the literature and painting of the Japanese archipelago. The photographer Ohyama Yukio lives in full view of Mount Fuji and for 40 years has been recording the different faces of this exceptional mountain, to which all his work is dedicated. “Mount Fuji is a goddess who makes sport of us humans”. Since his first encounter with the mountain in 1976, Ohyama has never stopped photographing it, at every season of the year, from all possible and imaginable points of view. Taking a total of 25 kg of photographic equipment to the summit of Fuji-san, he may wait a fortnight for the perfect moment to get the shot he wants. “Mount Fuji is a capricious mountain, reluctant to reveal a pretty face. That is why you need to wait patiently. As if I had become her slave. Whether it rains, snows or under a leaden sky, all you can do is wait. Sometimes, however, just for an instant, you encounter an incredibly beautiful landscape. At moments like that, an indescribable emotion passes through my whole body. That is why I always end up returning to the mountain.” In homage to this sacred mountain, and to Ohyama’s amazing work, three immense photographs will be displayed in the village of La Gacilly. For the space of one summer, our Breton village will be mantled in celestial snow. Born in 1952, Yukio Ohyama began his career as a photographer in 1971, before devoting all his artistic attention to Mount Fuji, on which he has published around ten works. For this exclusive body of work, in 2010 he was awarded the Grand Prize of the Photographic Society of Japan.

15 JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY Fukushima: 5 years later

On 11 March 2011, a powerful earthquake measuring 9 on the Richter scale caused a violent tsunami, which in turn triggered the nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima in Japan. The final toll was 15,884 people dead, 6,000 injured and almost 3,000 missing.

Reset – Beyond Fukushima As soon as he learned of the Fukushima catastrophe, Kazuma Obara resigned from his job at a finance company and immediately made his way to the scene, arriving three days later. He began by photographing the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami: the damage, the wrec- kage, the ruined houses, roads and harbours, the devastated landscape, and the shock of a place reduced to rubble. After meeting an employee of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station (FDNPP) who had lost his job, Obara decided to investigate the circumstances of these men who were under pressure from their company and the authorities to refrain from talking about the incident or drawing attention to themselves. He met more than 100 employees, some of whom were very young. To gain a better understanding, he went into the exclusion zone. Then, assisted by some of the workers, he found a way into the FDNPP plant itself. These meetings led Obara to wonder how nature recovers its usual pace and how life continues after Fukushima: the cherry trees blossom anew, people find food and clothing, the dead are buried, children play in their gardens, and eventually go back to school… Born in the Japanese town of Iwate in 1985, Kazuma Obara is a photographer and member of the KEYSTONE agency. After studying sociology at the University of Utsunomiya, he took a course in photojournalism at the Days Japan Photo Journalism School while working in the finance industry. Three days after the events of 11 March 2011, he resigned from his job and took up photojournalism full time. The unauthorised photographs he took inside the Fukushima Daiichi plant were published in a number of international newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, Le Point, Courrier International, ZEIT, El Mundo and DAYS JAPAN. His first book, Reset – Beyond Fukushima, was published on 10 March 2012 by Lars Müller Publishers. His exhibition of portraits of Fukushima workers has been staged more than 30 times in Japan and Europe. Since then, Kazuma Obara has been focusing on silent, faceless and forgotten victims and on the photobook as a medium. His second book, Silent Histories, focuses on the hidden victims of the war in the Pacific 70 years after the event, on the stories that were stifled by a booming Japan in the midst of its ‘economic miracle’. This book was a finalist for the 2014 Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Award. His third book is due to be published this year, 30 years after the disaster that struck Chernobyl, a place he has visited several times. Once again, it explores life in the aftermath, and how the seasons and inhabitants return to normal in the ebb and flow of nature, generations and life.

16 JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY Fukushima, 5 years later

During his first trip to the United States, Takashi Arai, a biologist and amateur photographer, discovered a book about US nuclear testing. In the photographs, the enormous atomic cloud seemed to burst forth in all directions with the force of its own light, like the sun casting out its rays. It was as if these atomic bombs were able to create brand new suns. Shortly afterwards, he saw the nuclear cloud filmed by a plane that was following Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 that dropped the first bomb, Bomb A, on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Upon seeing these ‘dreamlike’ images, this almost celestial vision, he immediately thought of the images depicting the aftermath at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – the ravaged bodies, burned flesh, and nightmares of suffering and horror. The contrast between the extreme beauty of the aerial images and the extreme monstrosity of the destroyed bodies struck Arai as a brutal dive into reality, with these two dimensions separated by an irreducible distance. “On 11 March 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant catastrophe was the first time I was suddenly confronted with the real dangers of nuclear exposure. The threat was real, but you couldn’t see anything. I was standing in the middle of nowhere, in limbo, walking across this devastated, apocalyptic land, thinking of those two contrasting images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With my camera obscura and my small silver plate exposed to these elements that were burnt and being burnt by a hundred suns, I waited there, holding my breath, on the lookout. I was trying to record enigmatic, invisible signs, hoping that these daguerreotypes would offer an incandescent imprint of the irradiating light, like micro monuments bearing the memory of this reality.” For Arai belongs to the generation of Japanese artists whose work seeks to present the social, emotional and psychological effects of the threefold disaster (earthquake tsunami, nuclear disaster), commonly referred to in Japon as “3/11”. Compared to the documentary and photojournalistic work of his peers, Arai stands out for his choice of process, the daguerreotype. This technique is, above all, a relatively slow, traditional process that involves a chemical reaction. In choosing to use this technique, Arai is less focused on making the destruction visible and more focused on representing something that is completely invisible: nuclear radiation. Daguerreotype is a photographic process developed by Louis Daguerre (1787–1851), which produces a photograph without a negative by fixing the image obtained from a camera obscura onto a pure silver surface, where it is directly exposed to light and developed with iodine vapour. Artist Takashi Arai was born in 1978 and is based in Tokyo. He is renowned as Japan’s only contemporary daguerreotypist. He discovered photography when he was studying biology. In 2010, he started to become interested in nuclear technology and the use of daguerreotypes. In 2011, his work was exhibited in several institutes, including the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Guimet Museum in Paris, and at various Japanese and European events. In 2015, to mark 70 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his work Monuments was published by T&M Projects. In France, he is represented by the Camera Obscura gallery.

17 JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY Fukushima, 5 years later

A few years earlier, I had decided to take a step back from my work as an artist and become a journalist. In 2011, I worked day and night, notably for a foreign television channel, to report on the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that had struck Japan. Three months after the catastrophe, while reporting from the town of Kamaishi where over 800 people died, I found roses blooming beside a blasted building. The juxtaposition of grace and ruin reminded me of a Japanese poem: In the spring, cherry blossoms, In the summer the cuckoo, In autumn the moon, and in Winter the snow, clear, cold. This poem by the Zen monk Dôgen describes the fleeting, fragile beauty of the changing seasons. Those roses bloomed simply because it was spring. That beautiful and uncomplicated statement, made by roses in the midst of ruins, left a lasting impression on me and reconnected me to art.

And where did the peacocks go? Just after the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, I read an article about some peacocks that had remained in the evacuation zone, which stretched out over a 20 km radius around the plant. I immediately pictured these peacocks, strolling around the deserted town with their magnificent plumage spread. The image that came to my mind was so far removed from what was actually happening at Fukushima. It was as if two quite distinct images − the ruins and chaos on the one hand, the majestic peacocks on the other − overlapped without blending together, without forming any sort of unity. I began seeing these two worlds almost everywhere all the time after the catastrophe in 2011. The accident had an enormous impact on us, and yet most of us did not know exactly what had happened, what was happening or what was going to happen in the future. Subsequently, Tokyo was chosen as host city for the 2020 Olympic Games. Some of the people who were evacuated have started to come home, and many farmers and fishermen have gone back to work. Others have moved far away, to the West, to get away from the Fukushima plants. The seasons come and go, people fall in love and children play... It is not my intention to introduce pessimism or to romanticise the tragedy. There have always been trials and tribulations, and beautiful things have always remained just as beautiful. Miho Kajioka was born on 21 February 1973 in Okayama, Japan. At the age of 18, she moved to California, where she studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, first in the painting department before gradually turning her hand to photography. In 1995, she moved to Montreal, Canada, where she continued her artistic training at Concordia University. After graduating, she returned to Japan and worked as a journalist, producer and documentary-maker, mainly for foreign television channels and media. After spending a year covering the 2011 catastrophe on the Pacific coast of Tokohu − the earthquake, the tsunami and the Fukushima disaster − for a Brazilian television channel, she decided to return to photography and her work as an artist. She has exhibited in various countries around the world and has won a number of prizes, particularly in Europe (Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy), where she has also spent time in residence (Norway).

18 JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY New perspectives

“All beginnings are the ending of something, and the completion of something is also the birth of a new story. Flower buds are as the stars of the universe. Blossoming forth into flowers ; wilting ; leaving behind a new seed. Named after the universe itself, cosmos flowers teach us of the strength to persevere with one’ s own evolution in the face of overwhelming adversity.” Kiiro

Kiiro’s creative focus rests on photographs of cosmos flowers taken regularly since 2009, such that these flowers have come to be the overarching theme of his work.Superimposing image upon image, Kiiro adds and subtracts layers in his unique photomontage style. In this way, rather than ‘portraying’ cosmos, perhaps his work may be more aptly defined as seeking out and presenting visually the omnipresent ‘poetry’ of a cosmos field. The tangled interweaving of stems, the flowers that strain upwards toward the heavens, the buds that frolic in space. Kiiro’s complex, pictorial approach denotes the original definition of cosmos: an expansive, perhaps infinite vastness filled with order and beauty of a sort, yet also imbued with something like a feeling that all struggle in life is in vain. Cosmos flowers are akin to the emotions of a young boy, says the artist. Perhaps Kiiro’s cosmos’ are something like a time capsule, comprising so many pale, distant memories and dreams. Seiji Komatsu, EMON Photo Gallery Director Kiiro is a Japanese photographer who was born in 1978. He studied oil painting at Meisei University before becoming a photographer. He exhibits his work in France, Belgium and the United States, as well as in Japan. A winner of the International Fine Art Photography Award in the Junior category, he also finished third at the International Photography Award in 2013. He is represented by the EMON Gallery in Tokyo.

19 JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY New perspectives

For an exhibition in 2009, Eriko Koga travelled to Koyasan, a fortified village on Mount Ko¯ya, to the south of Osaka. Koyasan is a very important and sacred place for Japanese Buddhists, as it is associated with a monk named Kükai, who founded Shingon Buddhism in the 9th century. In 2004, it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List as a “sacred site and pilgrimage route”. Hidden away in the blue-tinged depths of the mountains, among the passing clouds, this monastic sanctuary is as close as you can get to heaven, so close that the sun’s rays strike it directly, as do the stars at night. Not surprisingly, then, it became the subject of Eriko Koga’s next series of photographs: “Issan” (a contracted form of Koyasan). Initially concerned with landscape, the project gradually grew and developed. Eriko Koga became friends with the local people and took pleasure in meeting and learning from them, to the point where “in the end, the people became more important than the photographs”. She therefore reorganised her work around this “authenticity of feeling”: the misty spring air, lotus flowers in the breeze, an autumn cicada reflected in the woods, the motionless snow, people’s daily lives... with each image expressing the emotions and encounters she experienced on her trips to the area. One senses a profound resonance in the photographs of “Issan”, a palpable interaction of coincidences in each event. To use an old Japanese image, when precious stones such as crystal or jade come into contact, a delicate, almost imperceptible sound is produced. In old Japanese, the word “tamayura” (玉響) expresses this slight vibration of time. A little like the fleeting moments captured in “Issan”. Five years have passed since the beginning of the Issan series. Before that time, some places in Koyasan were closed to women, and Koga is the first female photographer to have had access to them. This was not due to the modernisation of society, but to Koga’s sensitive approach, her inclusion of herself in the project process, which made her personal conduct sincere and spiritual. The doors then opened quite naturally.

Born in 1980 in the prefecture of Fukuoka, Eriko Koga graduated in French Literature from Sophia University in Tokyo (1999-2003). She first devoted herself to photography in 2002. In her first series, entitled “Asakusa Zenzai”, she documented the life of an elderly couple in the village of Asakusa. This work brought her to public attention, and she enjoyed a degree of success. She has taken part in many festivals (at Pingyao and Guizhou in China, at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, at Bursa in Turkey, as well as in Japan). In 2015, she received the KG+Award in Kyoto, having previously won a number of prizes, including the Nikkei NATIONAL GEOGRA- PHIC Photo Award and the Guardian Garden Photo Documentary ‘Nippon’ 2004 Award. Her work is now represented in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Kiosato Museum of Photographic Arts.

20 JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY New perspectives

Natural hot springs, special places in Shinto religion, are found throughout the Japanese archipelago. For the Japanese, the ritual of bathing is an intimate expression of their relationship with the natural world, and with its vulnerability. In Tokyo, this love of nature drives city-dwellers to create artificial springs, which have become places of refuge in the urban chaos. Fascinated by Japan, which she first encountered as a tourist, and by the relationship between man and his natural environment, Lucille Reyboz has made it her business to explore these onsen: warms springs, bathed in a strange, fairy-tale atmosphere, sacred places for the Japanese, frequented even by the gods, where people bathe naked in the open air. “When people go to bathe in an onsen, they say they are returning to their mother’s womb”, explains Lucille Reyboz. Immersing herself in her subject, the photographer has on several occasions visited these traditional Japanese bathing places, in much-venerated natural settings. Thus she came to compose her “Sources” collection. The better to grasp these special moments when women let themselves go and blend into the natural world as if returning to their original matrix, she has shared in this experience with other female bathers. Her photographs are marked by a feeling of great calm and gentle serenity, as well as reflecting an intimate, feminine world, delicate and disturbing. With grace and sensitivity, Lucille Reyboz invites us on a timeless journey to a Japan that is both secretive and modest, bathed in a strange fairy-tale atmosphere. Furthermore, she sings an ode to nature and the female body. Fascinated by Japan, which she discovered during a trip with Salif Keita in 1999, Lucille Reyboz started visiting the country regularly, finally settling there in 2007. Today, she is undoubtedly the most “Japanese” of French photographers. Born in 1973, Lucille Reyboz grew up in Bamako (Mali). Initially a portraitist, she created a number of record covers for the Blue Note and Verve labels. She published her first photo- reportages in Air France Magazine, Elle and Le Monde. In 2001, after winning a Fondation Hachette prize for a collection on Japan, the Japanese people and their relationship with the natural world, she exhibited her work at “Visa pour l’Image”. Her first trip to Japan, in 1999, had brought her into contact with Shinto religion, which she experienced as very close to African animism. She divides her time between Africa and Japan, pursuing her work on the relationship between people and nature. In 2002, with Boris an Gils, she made “Tata”, a documentary featuring the Tamberma country in Togo. In 2004, she published “Batammaba, bâtisseurs d’univers” in Gallimard, then, in 2007, “Source” in the Editions de La Martinière. After settling in Japan, in 2013 she founded the Kyotographie Festival with Yusuke Nakanishi, which is now held annually in April/May.

21 JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY New perspectives

Yoshinori Mizutani is a child of the country. He was brought up in a small town in the Japanese province of Fukui, surrounded by an abundance of wildlife that nourished his young imagination. When he moved to Tokyo to attend art school, he felt lost in the hustle and bustle of the city, and far-removed from the natural landscapes that had defined his life. At the age of 18, he settled in Tokyo’s Setagaya district, a residential area with large parks that is the most densely populated area of the city. One morning, he saw hundreds of birds swarming the sky. He felt unsettled by this strange sight, as if caught up in Hitchcock’s film The Birds. Every day, these very colourful birds settled in the elm tree opposite his house and on the power cables crossing the street. Struck by their incongruous presence, Mizutani observed them: they were a kind of exotic, highly coloured budgerigar; parakeets, in fact. These birds had no natural place in Tokyo. They were imported from tropical India and Sri Lanka, where they are indige- nous, in the 1960s and ‘70s to be sold in Japan as pets. Then they adapted to life in Tokyo, flourished and multiplied in the wild. Today, their preferred nesting place is a ginkgo tree at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Mizutani prefers to photograph them against the darkening sky at dusk using a flash to capture the dichotomy between these wild animals and the ultra-high-tech metropolis, accentuating the gap between his childhood love of nature and the urban, electronic culture that conditions his artistic expressions. He continues to pursue his photographic project dedicated to exploring nature in Tokyo, roaming the city’s parks and scrutinising its rivers and skies. Yusurika, his given name, is also the name of an insect, a very delicate little midge that lives near lakes and ponds, and which also swarms. Photographed with a flash, eachyusurika is transformed into a tiny marble of white light, a fan- tastical little creature reminiscent of a fairy of nature. The artist who grew up surrounded by mountains, observing the fireflies around creeks and the red dragonflies flying over rice paddies, marvelling at the silvery light on the snow and the flowering trees in the spring, is also a child of the Tumblr-Facebook-Instagram generation. His images adorn the towering, limitless walls of the Internet. His photographs enable him to explore, reflect on and express his relationship with nature and with his own personal history. Born in 1987, Yoshinori Mizutani lives and works in Tokyo. He graduated from the Tokyo School of Photography in 2012. He has won a number of prestigious awards, including the Japan Photo Prize in 2013, and the Amsterdam Foam Talent and LensCulture Emerging Talents Top 50 prizes in 2014.

22 JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY New perspectives

Sohei Nishino creates dioramas of Japanese cities: giant photographic maps made up of several thousand images. To construct one of his dioramas, Nishino roams the streets of a city for several weeks, explores them from many points of view and takes thousands of photographs. These are then painstakingly printed and assembled, one by one, to form an image reminiscent of 18th-century engraved maps. At first sight, the image looks like an aerial view of the city but, as you get closer, you find that it is a three-dimensional plan: the interplay of 2D and 3D breaks down the notion of scale and perspective. Although the geographical location is clear, the scales have been modified and the different places sometimes repeated, just as our memories of locations become vague with distance and the passage of time. Seen from afar, these maps are almost abstract; it is only when you examine them in detail that the diorama process is set fully in motion, as if the drama of the city were being played out in miniature. “I wander around these cities, camera in hand, taking a multitude of shots, so that I can later assemble them one by one, as I remember them, and thus create a geographical representation constituting the portrait of a place.” The result is, in actual fact, anything but a precise geographical map. It is more the city as seen through the eyes of an individual, a record of his wanderings through its streets, an expression of feelings about the microcosms, life and energy that go to make up a city. The diorama is a subjective cartographic representation of this experience, a city expressed through memories and images. Nishino’s diorama maps combine photography, collage, cartography and psycho-geography to create large engraving-type images of urban landscapes. Drawing their inspiration from the most famous of Japanese cartographers, Ino Tadataka (18th century), these photographic maps are re-imaginings of the cities Nishino has visited. Sohei Nishino was born in 1982 and graduated from the Osaka Fine Art School in 2014. Winner of the Canon New Cosmos of Photography Excellence Award in 2005, he has taken part in a number of collective exhibitions and international festivals, including “Contemporary Japanese Photography vol.10” at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (2012), and the ICP Triennial “A Different Kind of Order” at the ICP in New York (2013). The same year, he received the Photographic Society of Japan’s prize for talented young photographers and was selected as one of the artists for Foam Magazine’s Foam Talent Call 2013.

23 JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY New perspectives

“I only take the photographs I want to take.” “I like to include artificial elements in natural landscapes. I like people to sense a slight interven- tion on the part of the photographer.” “The dunes are my studio. It is impossible to imagine a more perfect background, as the horizon extends endlessly into the distance. I would say that dunes form an almost natural landscape for photography. Here we have nature, but reduced to a single backdrop.” Shoji Ueda The work of Shoji Ueda occupies an unusual place in the history of 20th-century photography. Looking out to sea, amid an eternal stretch of sand, he never tired of taking pictures of his family, friends and neighbours. Among his beloved dunes at Tottori, near his home and 800 km south- west of the ferment of Tokyo, he produced an endless stream of photographs between 1949 and 1980, imaginary fables, steeped in humour and poetic candour. Here he played the role of stage manager of a world both playful and tender. He chronicled the song of childhood in a theatre sometimes joyous, always curious. As an armchair adventurer, he experimented with different techniques, ran a curious eye over everything around him, explored the landscape season by season, tirelessly choreographed people as if pinning them to the horizon, if not to the razor’s edge of time. There is something of Magritte in his images, not to mention Jacques Tati and Man Ray, when he experiments with different techniques, and of Kertesz, when he plays around with lines. Yet it is, above all, to Lartigue that he acknowledges a debt. Between fantasy and the quest for an elusive happiness, he creates dreamlike drama in a poetic, playful world, a sort of motionless journey into reverie and whimsy. Ueda was born in 1913 in Sakaïminato, a small town in the south-west of Japan, where he lived all his life. Having graduated from the Oriental School of Photography in Tokyo, he decided to open his own studio, which he ran with his wife and where he also sold films and photographic equipment. Very much involved in organising photography clubs, he loved sharing his passions. Ueda regarded himself as an amateur. All his life, he was fiercely determined to maintain his independence as an artist, keeping a safe distance from both the post-pictoralist school and the various avant-garde movements. In the late 1950s, his photographs drew the attention of Edward Steichen and featured prominently in the famous exhibition devoted to Japanese photography at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1960. This was followed by exhibitions and retrospectives in a number of important museums and institutions around the world. Since then, his work has been recognised as one of the most captivating contributions to 20th-century Japanese photography. He is greatly respected in Japan. In 1995, the Shoji Ueda Museum of Photography, entirely devoted to his life’s work, was opened in Kishimotocho, in his beloved Tottori region. He died in 2000 in his home town.

24 NOURRIR LA PLANÈTE

LA GACILLY A DIFFERENT VIEW OF THE WORLD

25 THE OCEANS A planetary challenge

“My photographs can bring the polar kingdoms to life and, I hope, arouse a passionate deter- mination to preserve them.” It is not surprising that Paul Nicklen is known as the “master of the ice floes”: born in 1968 in the Canadian Arctic, he spent his childhood among the Inuit of Baffin Island. He recalls: “We had neither radio, television nor telephone. All my time was spent in the open air. When I was seven, I borrowed my father’s ice axe, climbed a mountain and cut a hole in the ice to catch an arctic char. I had fun, but I was also learning to survive in this environment. I spent hours, at temperatures of 30° below, watching belugas swim in the crystal clear water.” Thus was born his passion for observing the fauna of the polar regions. For a time, he worked as a biologist for the Canadian government, but became aware he was not cut out for the job: “I was not a very good scientist. I could never come to terms with the idea of converting natural elements into computerised data.” He then decided to take up photography, the only way, as he saw it, to raise people’s awareness of the dangers threatening the wildlife of the region. An exceptional diver capable of resisting the most extreme cold, a cameraman with a revolutionary shooting technique, a member of the prestigious National Geographic magazine, he is now regarded as one of the greatest wildlife photographers. Paul Nicklen’s challenge is to get as close as possible to animals in their natural setting, braving the icy waters of the Far North: for months, he will pursue the Atlantic walrus, dangerous and unpredictable, the leopard seal, the penguin or the polar bear, taking astounding pictures of these animals living on borrowed time, because all these creatures are under threat. Scientists agree that the Arctic ice has entered a “fatal spiral” as temperatures rise. As global warming continues, the ice floes of the region will completely disappear, and many endemic species may be unable to survive. The beauty of his images is therefore all the more heart-rending... A photographer of extremes, Paul Nicklen has received more than thirty prizes, including five World Press awards and 14 BBC Wildlife Photo distinctions. He is also a member of the International League of Conservation Photographers.

26 THE OCEANS A planetary challenge

Pollution caused by human activity is turning our seas and oceans into a giant dustbin. The worst culprits are oil tankers and ships carrying chemicals, as well as drilling rigs. The Spanish photographer Daniel Beltra has recorded this phenomenon with images of terrifying beauty. On 20 April 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, leaking 780 million litres of crude oil into the sea. In just a few days, an oil slick spread over an area of tens of kilometres. This unprecedented environmental disaster was to prove long-lasting. Whereas the event made headlines for just a few days, scientists believe that 75% of the oil spilt has remained in the environment and settled on the sea bed. Using aerial photographs taken off the coast of Louisiana, Daniel Beltra recorded oil slicks which, seen from above, form a stunning picture of orange and blue. He captured these fires and the black smoke rising from them in the heart of the ocean, floating dams positioned to stop the oil slick, as well as pelicans covered in oil and condemned to a horrible death. “I draw inspiration from the beauty and complexity of nature. My photographs show the magni- tude of the transformations our world is undergoing as a result of human pressure”, says Daniel Beltra. The technical perfection and artistic quality of Beltra’s work, characterised by simplicity and graphic construction, has resulted in images which, from an environmental point of view, are as magnificent as they are shocking. Born in Madrid but living in Seattle (United States), Daniel Beltrá, a biologist by training, has always been deeply passionate about these issues, denouncing man’s destruction of his natural environment, celebrating areas of wilderness, taking photographs as both a journalist and artist. His images of deforestation in Amazonia, or the dangers of climate change for the ecosystems of Antarctica and the Arctic, combine beauty with a cry for help. His work on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico earned him the prestigious title of Wildlife Photographer of the Year in 2011. He has been awarded many prizes and his reports are regularly published in the international press, The New Yorker, Time, The New York Times, Le Monde and El País.

27 THE OCEANS A planetary challenge

We are accustomed to taking from the oceans unlimited quantities of the fish and seafood we enjoy eating. Since the ocean depths are invisible, we imagine them as limitless. However, fishing is an activity which involves drawing on stocks: the more we catch, the fewer the fish left to reproduce and replenish the original quantities. Now that we have forgotten this fact, we engage in an industrial mode of fishing that exhausts fish stocks. Illegal fishing is increasing, as if the sea were a place where law does not apply. The bycatch, i.e. the creatures unintentionally captured during fishing operations, such as sponges, sharks, dolphins and turtles, may account for up to 80% of the total catch, and it is likely that 20 million tonnes are thrown back dead each year, the equivalent of one fish in every four caught. Although scientists have sounded the alarm bell, the politicians allow this massacre to continue. Industrial fishing fleets are free to do as they please. Short-term interests determine political decisions. This unlimited exploitation of our oceans, and more generally of our planet, is having direct and manifest effects on marine biodiversity. Many species are threatened with extinction, such as whales, dolphins, sharks, cod and blue-fin tuna. Yet the list is much longer than that. 80% of commercial species are overexploited. At the present rate, there will be no fish left in the oceans by 2050. What will we do then? This question is already a burning issue for the billion people on earth who depend totally on the produce of the sea for their intake of animal protein. The destruction of marine biodiversity also has serious implications for food security. In 1980, at the age of 23, Pierre Gleizes embarked the “Rainbow Warrior” as a photographer and crew member. A supporter of Greenpeace for more than thirty years, privileged witness on the non-violent activity of this movement heralding the rise of environmental awareness, with his camera he was to become a key player in the creation of its media image. The work we are presenting is the result of many campaigns fought to bring attention to overfishing, off the coasts of Africa, in Scotland and in the China Sea. These images have travelled around the world, making the case against such practices more effectively than any words could. Born in Paris in 1956, Pierre Gleizes founded the Greenpeace International photographic service and has always supported the activities of the Greenpeace movement. After seven years with the Associated Press, he went freelance in 1991 and has specialised in ethno- geographical reportages. Since 2009, this lover of the sea has lived as a nomad on the French inland waterway network on board the “Nicéphore”, a way of life that gives him better access to people and their environment, and has taught him to cope with the unexpected.

28 THE OCEANS A planetary challenge

The tiny island of Ghoramara, at the mouth of the Ganges delta in the Bay of Bengal (India), is under threat. As a result of global warming and rising sea levels, the island has been gradually shrinking since the 1960s, as its shores are eroded at each high tide. Since the 1980s, more than half of the island has disappeared, and two-thirds of the population have been obliged to leave their homes. The remaining 2,000 inhabitants, farmers and fishermen, depend entirely on the island’s resources for their livelihoods. According to recent reports, Ghoramara will be completely submerged within the next 25 years. The Indian government has already drawn up a plan to evacuate the inhabitants to Sagar Island, farther down the Ganges, but it is not guaranteeing financial aid or compensation to the displaced villagers. While paying tribute to the people of Ghoramara, Daesung Lee hopes that his ghostly images will raise people’s awareness of the ravages of global warming. Under a hazy sun, surrounded on every side by the sea, his models stand among the vestiges of their island, alone and powerless. “The shores of Ghoramara bear the traces of a lost world”, says the photographer. “As the sho- reline recedes and the vegetation disappears, a strangely beautiful landscape emerges. I asked the local people to pose on the shore of their island, which makes the beauty of the place even more unreal. And yet, there scenes are very real indeed. They bear witness to a world destined to disappear. They illustrate the tragic fate of these people, who one day will have no other choice but to leave their island. One day, this island where they were born will be no more than a memory. The sea is swallowing up their past, while their future seems very uncertain.” Born in 1975 in Busan (South Korea), Daesung Lee graduated in Fine Arts (specialism photography) from Chung-Ang University in Seoul. He then travelled the world, before devoting himself, in 2007, to documentary photography, the style that accords best with his commitment to social issues. Much of the artist’s work is concerned with globalisation and its impact on the environment. His most recent project, “Futuristic Archaeology”, illustrates desertification in Mongolia, with 75% of the country affected by this problem. The Guardian, La Repubblica and M (the Le Monde magazine) are among the titles that have published his work.

29 THE OCEANS A planetary challenge

A few kilometres from Chittagong, on the east coast of the Bay of Bengal, a man is suspended behind the threatening propeller of an old cargo ship. Using only a blow-torch and his bare hands, he is one of an army of workers tasked with the job of dismantling, piece by piece, the carcass of the abandoned vessel. Chittagong, the second largest city in Bangladesh and the country’s main port, takes in ships that come here to die when no one has any further purpose for them. For more than 13 kilometres, stripped down supertankers and icebergs of steel stretch away, one after another, into the far distance. These elderly marine monsters come from Germany, Singapore and even France. In fact more than 200 ships have ended up here, at the end of their lives, after plying the world’s oceans. 60% of the steel used in Bangladesh comes from the Chittagong shipyards, recycled at low cost in inhumane conditions, free of all health and safety regulations. The photographer Shiho Fukada has managed to visit these ships’ graveyards and has shared the poverty-stricken lives of the people who work there, 20% of whom are under 15 years of age. A true hell, accentuated by his images shot at night or in twilight. Countless workers are maimed, injured or killed on these hulks, which are as high as 20-storey buildings, 300 metres in length, and contain highly toxic substances, such as asbestos, lead and other heavy metals. The NGO Shipbreaking Platform recently told the story of Khorshed Alam, a 16-year-old who lost his life, crushed by a metal plate on one of these vessels: he was working 12 hours a day, for a daily pittance of 3 dollars. Shiho Fukada is a Japanese photo-journalist and documentary maker. She now lives between Boston, and Tokyo, having previously lived in Beijing. After graduating in English literature, she first worked in fashion publishing as an account manager, before becoming a photographer and specialising in social issues, particularly in Japan, China and Iraq. She has won many prizes, including the Visa d’Or, World Press and UNICEF Photo of the Year awards. Her photographic reportages have been published in the New York Times, Stern and Le Monde, while her documentaries have been broadcast on the CNN and MSNBC networks.

30 THE OCEANS A planetary challenge

The world’s seas and oceans are also the setting for the most distressing of tragedies. In recent months, the spotlight has been on men, women and children, whole families fleeing the fighting and atrocities of Syria in search of a country that will give them refuge. In 2015, more than a million migrants arrived in Europe by both land and sea. Shipwrecks have been a frequent occurrence, with 3,000 unfortunate souls perishing on Europe’s very doorstep. Having travelled the world from one war zone to another, Olivier Jobard, a photographer with the Myop agency, decided to concentrate on migration and associated issues. For more than a decade, he has been documenting the routes taken by migrants, and their daily lives, accom- panying them for long periods. In three separate reportages, the exhibition “By sea into exile” follows the destinies of three families in their quest for Eldorado. Getting behind the impersonal narrative of mass migration, he seeks to understand the identity of these refugees who have resigned themselves to losing everything – their roots, their country, their home – and are risking their very lives in the hope of a better life. In 2004, Olivier Jobard met Kingsley, a young man aged 22, who had decided to leave Cameroon for Europe. His clandestine journey via Africa and the Atlantic Ocean was to last more than eight months. In 2011, when the regime of Ben Ali collapsed, Slah, like thousands of other Tunisians, thought he could make a better life for his family by going to France. He crossed the Mediterranean in a rickety old fishing-boat, which fetched up on the Italian island of Lampedusa. At the end of the journey, disappointment. In 2015, Ahmad at last left his tortured homeland of Syria with his wife and two children. Like thousands of others, they landed on the Greek island of Kos, eventually making their way to Sweden: a 4,000-kilometre journey beset with dangers of all kinds though nine countries... At a time when migrants are represented as faceless hordes, these human “adventures” show them to be the modest heroes of our globalised world. Olivier Jobard was born in 1970 and remained a member of the Sipa agency until 2011. His work has received widespread recognition: the Povi Award of Excellence (2000), the World Press Photo Contemporary Issues Prize (2005), an Emmy Award for his documentary work (2006) and two Visa d’Or awards, in the News category (2004) and the Magazine category (2011).

31 THE OCEANS In Brittany

A short boat trip from Vannes or Quiberon and you find yourself in another world, the world of the Canard (Duck) and the Caneton (Duckling). These are the nicknames of Houat and Hoëdic, two car-free seafaring islands facing the ocean, protected by a series of cliffs. The Île aux Moines, for its part, right at the heart of the Golfe du Morbihan, stands sentry over the Breton hinterland. Three little corners of paradise to delight the holiday-makers who come here in summer to recharge their batteries, away from the French mainland. The figures speak volumes: Houat has 3,000 inhabitants in summer, just 230 in winter. The same is true of Hoëdic and the Île aux Moines, which see their populations increase by a factor of ten in the sunny days of July and August. For this year’s festival devoted to the world’s oceans, with support from the Morbihan Depart- mental Council, we asked photographer Guillaume Herbaut to go and investigate these island treasures when the summer visitors had flown, when the colder days had come, storms had arrived to pound these fragile shores, and at last the islanders were left to their own devices. A photographic essay showing the true face, the wild nature of these fragments of land. One belongs to an island more than to a country. Island life goes beyond nationality and forges character. Island-dwellers are not comfort-lovers. They exhibit a rebellious, often taciturn nature. For one’s island, one would fight to the point of risking shipwreck. Winter is indeed the time to approach Houat or Hoëdic if you want to grasp the life of a place battered by the breakers, the daily existence of people dependent on the mainland for a shuttle service of boats to take the younger generation to secondary school or bring in provisions. Living on an island all the year round means submitting yourself to the climate, the winds, the currents. An exhibition that sheds light on a world apart... Born in 1970, Guillaume Herbaut makes his living as a photojournalist. In 1995, he co-founded the Œil Public collective, before joining Institute in 2011. In parallel with commissions from the print media, his documentary work takes him to places charged with history, investiga- ting their symbols and memory to reveal the invisible tragedies they conceal: Chernobyl, Auschwitz, Nagasaki, and more recently the conflict in Ukraine. As well as Visa pour l’Image, his photographs have been exhibited at the Jeu de Paume in Paris and projected at the Rencontres d’Arles. He has received two World Press awards and the Niépce Prize, and he has published six monographs.

32 THE OCEANS In Brittany

Beginning in the 1950s, Anita Conti was able to break into a world in which women traditionally remained ashore. Moving from one ship to another, one sea to another, she carved out a niche among the seamen, sharing the joys and troubles of their daily lives, characterised by the pulling in of nets, the weight of lines and the storm-tossed foam. Above all a scientist, she was one of the first to understand the real importance of maritime fisheries, faced with the needs of hungry populations. Testing her research against the reality she witnessed, she assumed a teaching role, passing on the lessons she had learned. Gentle and sharp-sighted, the way she saw things through the lens of her camera was humane, intimate, sincere and loving. Her images are full of courage and energy, reflecting the deep meaning of the elements and the struggles of those who confront them, but without sensationalism. Images which are documents of a bygone era but, for all that, are nonetheless visionary. Because Anita Conti foresaw the dangers of the thoughtless exploitation of the sea and its resources, at a time when they seemed inexhaustible. Her photographs sounded a clear warning and, decades later, continue to be amazingly topical. Anita Conti was born in 1899. Writer, photographer, the first female oceanographer, she was one of those exceptional people who bestrode her century as a passionate, free adventurer. She passed away in 1997 in Douarnanez (Finistère), one stormy evening, which also happened to be Christmas Eve. She left a body of work which is too often forgotten: 40,000 exceptional shots of the oceans she knew so well, of the Breton sailors she accompanied on their voyages. The Festival de la Gacilly wants to pay homage to this great lady of the sea, who devoted practically all of her life and energies to the world of fishing.

33 THE OCEANS In Brittany

A projected digital work, created during an artistic residence at the Créac’h lighthouse on the island of Ushant (Ouessant), in January 2016. Ushant, an island in the Atlantic Ocean located 20 kilometres from the west coast of the Finis- tère region, is the westernmost part of mainland France. Its name, which comes from the word Uxisama ( ), means ‘the highest island’ or the ‘the island farthest from the mainland.’ Créac’h lighthouse (‘Créac’h’ means ‘promontory’ in Breton) is situated on the western tip of the island Oυξισαμηand is recognisable for its black and white stripes. It is now home to the Musée des Phares et Balises (museum dedicated to lighthouses and beacons), and hosts artist residences organised by Finistère’s local authorities. The La Gacilly Festival will project this digital piece of art created collectively by photographers Jean-François Spricigo and Benjamin Deroche. It is made up of photographs, texts, sound bites and videos produced during their residence at Créac’h lighthouse in January 2016. It addresses the shared experience of artistic creation when isolated from the world for an entire winter, the exploration of self, abandonment to the ocean, the dialogue between wind and sea, and the breath of creation.

We are here, breathing in. Walking at the water’s edge, at the edge of a world, from island to island, an ellipsis towards a sentence that is yet to be written. An air of elsewhere, of salt, cold tears, the self, completely transported to another place. Elsewhere. Breathing it all in, to the rhythm of a gentle dance, exploring the winds. Gathering together towards infinity. Jean-François Spricigo was born in Belgium in 1979 and graduated with a degree in Images from the INSAS film and theatre school in Brussels in 2002. His awards include the Prix de Photographie de l’Académie des Beaux-Arts (2008) and the Prix découverte des Rencontres d’Arles (2009). He has spent time in residence at Casa de Velázquez (2012) and the Cent- Quatre (2014). He regularly works with other artists (Marcel Moreau, Albin de la Simone, Alexandre Tharaud, etc.) and publishes literary works. Benjamin Deroche was born in Brittany in 1981. He has a PhD in photography and visual analysis from the University of Western Brittany and is a lecturer in art. He has held exhibitions involving visitors trails in four museums in Brittany (summer 2015), and at the CAP in Brest (2014 and 2016). He was featuring during Photo Month at the Françoise Paviot Gallery in Paris (2014) and has published several photographic books.

34 THE OCEANS EMERGING PHOTOGRAPHY The Oceans

Period for submissions: 8 February to 15 March 2016

Theme: The Oceans As part of its 13th edition, the Photo Festival has decided to widen its scope and welcome contributions that support emerging photography. It has thus launched a call for submissions on the theme of the oceans: naturalist photographs, shots of natural disasters, images showing the movement of people or goods, creative visual photography, and more... The oceans are at the heart of globalisation and are witnessing major changes. Having exhibited his work at La Gacilly in 2014, photographer Guillaume Herbaut is now working on a photography commission based on the islands of the Morbihan region for the 2016 festival. He is sponsoring this first foray into emerging photography with a dedicated gallery.

Committed to supporting up-and-coming photographers The photographers selected will get an opportunity to exhibit a selection of their photographs in a gallery dedicated to emerging photography at La Gacilly Photo Festival. But as well as simply exhibiting their work, the winners will benefit from various major consultations aimed at helping them to develop as professional artists and understand the many aspects involved in the work of a professional photographer. They will receive expert advice about editing photographs and preparing exhibitions, attend meetings with the press and several photography professionals at the official opening of the 2016 Photo Festival, be able to show their portfolios to professional photographers and garner feedback, and discuss ways of transitioning to other exhibitions and festivals. The project is financed and supported by Le Magic Hall hotel, Agelia laboratories and Fisheye magazine.

How to enter Candidates must send a selection of 10 photographs together with their official application. For more information, please contact: [email protected] www.festivalphoto-lagacilly.com

35 THE OCEANS

© James Chevreuil / France IMAGE SANS FRONTIÈRE COLLECTIVE The IMAGE SANS FRONTIÈRE collective, an international association of photographers which has been a partner of the Festival de La Gacilly from its earliest days, has called on its members, as it does every year, to illustrate the theme for 2016: The Oceans. Free man, you will always cherish the sea! The sea is your mirror... (Charles Baudelaire) Man looks at himself in the sea, rediscovers himself in this immense liquid mirror. From the icy, hostile Arctic to the warm, caressing seas of the tropics, mankind has always tried to tame this element, which is the source of life. Strange landscapes in a safe and comfortable world, sub- marine life in a dark blue setting or bursts of colour along its shores, the Ocean is life itself... To be discovered in the 20 images selected by the photographers of IMAGE SANS FRONTIÈRE.

MORBIHAN PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL FOR SECONDARY SCHOOL PUPILS The organisation of a festival for secondary school pupils, as part of the “Peuples et Nature” official festival programme, is a wonderful opportunity to highlight the work done by pupils. This is above all an educational project, with the principal objective of getting pupils to think about a subject through the medium of photography.Teachers and pupils have been working throughout the school year on material for display during the 2016 festival, which will take the form of two panels for each school. There is also a blog featuring the pupils’ work during the year. On the strength of the success of previous years, the Peuples et Nature Festival and the Morbihan Departmental Council, in partnership with the national Education Service, have invited secondary schools in the Morbihan Department to take part this year in the photography festival for secondary school pupils. This year, 16 state and independent schools have been selected to take part in the event, which means that more than 350 pupils have committed themselves to the project. More than a mere “academic exercise”, each year this exhibition reflects the creativity and artistic approach of the pupils involved. The pupils of 16 state and independent secondary schools in the Morbihan Department have been working throughout the school year on the concept of this exhibition, enthusiastically supported by their teachers and photographer mentors (Yvon Boëlle, Frédéric Mouraud, Gwénaël Saliou, Cédric Wachthausen, Eric Frotier de Bagneux and Hervé Le Reste). In learning about the work of a professional photographer, developing their powers of observation and artistic composition, and selecting photographs, they have been discovering the many facets of photographic work. To see their work and for further information: http://leoffdescollegiens.morbihan.fr/ 36 LA GACILLY AN IMMERSION IN PICTURES ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES In partnership with the Yves Rocher Foundation – Institut de France

His first visit to the Great Red Island was in 1993. For Pascal Maitre, it was a discovery, but also a shock, as he became aware of the great generosity and kindness of the Malagasy people, despite the harshness of their way of life. Each time he visits, he returns amazed, fascinated, with a desire to learn more about the soul of this people, the country’s unique biodiversity, the light which one finds only in southern Africa and, of course, these magnificent baobab trees, which have become the fragile symbol of this nation. “In photographing a baobab, one is touching on magic, fairy stories, dreamscapes, as much as reality. I have always wanted to show the close bond between these amazing trees and human beings.” Because these magnificent giants have supported human communities since time immemorial: they bear edible fruits, shelter diviners as they perform healing ceremonies, and their trunks, when hollowed out, are used for storing water collected during the wet season. Finally, their flowers bloom for just one night, as if to make themselves all the more desirable and remind the world how very delicate and ephemeral so powerful a force of nature can be. In the shade of these baobabs, Maitre, renowned for the special colouration of his photographs, also shows us a Madagascar of which he has an intimate knowledge. He travels this strange land with gentleness, dignity and benevolence, despite the painful convulsions it has suffered. In close contact with this people and their natural environment, Pascal Maitre offers us these images of a beating heart, of an island apart, as if separated from the African continent to preserve its identity and natural treasures. Born in the Berry region in 1955, Pascal Maitre began his career as a photojournalist in 1979, working for the magazine Jeune Afrique. In 1984, he joined the Gamma agency, before co- founding the Odyssey Images agency in 1989. He covered events in Afghanistan, travelled around Russia after the fall of the Wall, reported on the violence taking place in Sao Paulo and made the world aware of the guerrilla war in Colombia. The continent he loves best is, however, Africa. His freelance reportages of events in the Congo, in Nigeria or on Lake Chad are regularly published in such prestigious magazines as the National Geographic, Paris-Match, Géo Allemagne and Le Figaro Magazine. In September 2015, the Visa pour l’Image International Festival of Photojournalism, held in Perpignan, paid tribute to him and his work, awarding him a Visa d’Or for lifetime achievement.

38 ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES In partnership with the Yves Rocher Foundation – Institut de France

The American photographer Lianne Milton was the first winner, in 2015, of the prize for photography awarded by the Fondation Yves Rocher, in partnership with the Visa pour l’Image International Festival of Photojournalism, held in Perpignan. A prize intended to support photographic work on problems relating to the environment, the relationship between mankind and the Earth, and the great issues of sustainable development. We are displaying the results of her project this year at La Gacilly. Everyone has heard of the Sertao, the region in the north-west of Brazil with an exceptionally high level of poverty due to repeated droughts. Here, farmers grow just enough food for their families, forced as they are to come to terms with water shortages and irregular rainfall. Since 2013, the drought conditions have worsened, spelling the death of livestock and turning the land into an immense salt-laden desert. This desolate land, sun-baked and dusty, lies between the humid tropic forests of Amazonia to the west and the country’s north-east coastline. Here we find the greatest concentration of rural poverty in the whole of Latin America, affecting 35% of the region’s population. Lianne Milton made several trips to the region between September 2015 and March 2016. She wanted to show the impact of climate change on these “subsistence” farmers of the Sertao, and how people are trying to adapt to this dramatic situation. Born in 1976, originally from San Francisco, Lianne Milton now lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her work as a photojournalist traces the repercussions of politics on people and their environment, in South-East Asia and South America, as well as the United States. She began her career in 2009, denouncing the application of sharia law in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, after the devastating tsunami that ravaged the coastal areas of the province. Then she explored such subjects as food insecurity and the violence in Guatemala, and the impact on ethnic minorities of damming rivers in Cambodia. She is a member of the Panos Pictures agency and her work appears regularly in international publications, such as The Sunday Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek and The Guardian.

39 JAPAN AS SEEN BY ARTE The television channel ARTE is offering all those who visit La Gacilly Photo Festival a series of special programmes dedicated to Japan: a selection of documentaries providing an insight into the secret world of its food and fla- vours, the mysteries of the tea route, the wilder side of Japan and the aesthetic beauty and purity of its photography and architecture.

Projections open to the general public Végétarium Café In July and August Wednesdays at 5 pm

CONTACTS

La Gacilly, in the Morbihan region of Brittany, is near Rennes, Vannes and Nantes.

Travelling by train High-speed train (TGV): Paris Montparnasse > Redon (2 hrs 45 mins) Then Redon > La Gacilly (15 minutes by car)

Contacts Association Festival Photo La Gacilly Festival Photo La Gacilly Rue des Graveurs, BP 11, 56204 La Gacilly Tel. : + 33 2 99 08 68 00 [email protected] www.festivalphoto-lagacilly.com

Festival Photo La Gacilly La Gacilly Photo

Press contacts 2e BUREAU Sylvie Grumbach, Martial Hobeniche, Noémie Grenier Tel : + 33 1 42 33 93 18 [email protected] www.2e-bureau.com

Graphic design Michel Bouvet Studio

Printed in partnership with Edicolor (Bain-de-Bretagne) France