L'oeil présent - Photographing the Festival d'Avignon making time stand still

From the wings to centre-stage, Christophe Raynaud de Lage has been photographing the performances at the Festival d’Avignon for seventeen years.
Courtyards, cloisters, gymnasiums, quarries ... wind, heat, rain ... are all part of his images… Daytime images, night-time work, he has taken thousands of photos which lead a demanding life. In nearly real-time, his photographs show up on the Festival website on the evening of the première. They illustrate press articles the very next day, they feed the social networks throughout the festival.
A few weeks later, they go on tour, internationally, with the artists themselves. And a few years later, they go into archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
For this exhibit, entitled 'L’œil présent', the photographer did not want any chronological order. Here, he has sought a sensorial approach - visual, tactile and sound. Every image is in and of itself 'a reminiscence, an incisive fragment' of a given year at the Festival. For the viewer, it is immersion in the heart of the living memory of the Festival. The exhibit is a stroll from venue to venue, an itinerary from themes to glances, metatheatre in reflections. Photographer Christophe Raynaud de Lage wants viewers to plunge into his images, to feel and even relive past festivals.

This exhibit is part of the 76th edition of the Festival d'Avignon.

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