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 pho- tographic 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 broad- cast, 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 activi- ties. 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.