Articles

Emmanuel Bacquet: Romy Alizée, you began as a model, then switched to wielding the camera to create your own images. What was behind this change?

Patrick Séraudie, a filmmaker specializing in history subjects, and the Second World War in particular, made the documentary “WR, A Day in Oradour” with Willy Ronis. A conversation about the photographer’s memories and the international history of the “Peace Movement”. Patrick Séraudie first met the photographer while preparing the film Self-portrait of a Photographer, of which he was the producer.

Robert Frank made very few concessions; whether to success, to style, or to photography itself.
But in the visual language he created from film and photo, in this form of poetic writing, made up of scraps and fragments, of fits of enthusiasm closely followed by despair, he built a singular work.

British film director Gerald Fox has produced many portraits of artists, photographers in particular. But Robert Frank, while being an artist who opens up about his own life through his work, was nonetheless a man of mystery, complicated, withdrawn from the world. Gerald Fox revisits the story of this film, just like Frank himself, with its ups and downs, but above all exciting and human.

Fototracce is the photographic association that is behind the production of the film African Photo : Mama Casset. Its members include its director, Elisa Mereghetti; and also Maddalena Cerletti, Melissa Nicolini and Giovanna Burinato. They answered our questions altogether ! 

Emmanuel Bacquet: Sara Imloul, it's been five years since DK2R came to film you at work. While putting together your Das Schloss series, you explore a very personal visual poetry thanks to the view camera and paper duplicates, giving the prints a timeless appearance. Since then you've created other series, in particular Passages, which won you the Prix Levallois. Could you tell us more about your recent journey?

How to define what photography is, what distinguishes it from its elders, painting, engraving, drawing (to which it was for a long time subservient) or, if you'd rather, what constitutes this specific mode of representation? When Bettina Rheims began her career in the late 1970s, only a small number of books were devoted to photography and the question remained embryonic, possibly unformulated. A few studies were beginning to surface, such as Susan Sontag's; Barthes had not yet published Camera Lucida; rare were the monographs that allowed us to tackle a coherent set of works. In a way it was a new age of pioneers, both for artists and for galleries, and the public and private collections that were gradually emerging.

Emmnauel Bacquet: You have photographed women a lot, though not exclusively, and what is striking is the way the markers appear jumbled in your pictures. There's no apparent classification between stars and unknowns, between commissioned photos and those taken outside of any campaign.

Nathalie Masduraud and Valérie Urréa are documentary filmmakers. Beyond their personal films (on autism and dance, among others, for Valérie, and on the occupation and the French colonies for Nathalie), they join forces to produce many societal and historical documentaries.
They have thus worked in particular on Iranian and South African photography. Their joint projects generally focus on the artistic and social recognition of women.

Emmanuel Bacquet: Nicolas Becker, you are an internationally recognised sound creator, contributing to the scores of many feature films, from La Haine to Brotherhood of the Wolf, including Harry Potter, Gravity, Thomas Vinterberg's Kursk and very recently Sound of Metal, whether as foley artist or, more broadly, supervising sound designer.  

Violence is an infinitely diverse phenomenon in terms of its sectors, its actors, its victims, its forms, its practices and its intensities. Not all violence is the same. It can be private, public, and even legal (if not legitimate), like police violence.

The work of Saul Leiter was rediscovered, with his street photographs brought to light in the 1990s.
His photos of New York (from as early as 1948) earned him a significant reputation in the latter years of his life, especially for his use of colour.

For DK2R, British director Tomas Leach revisits his film "In No Great Hurry" on Saul Leiter. With great sincerity, he confirms what is felt in the film: the meeting with Saul Leiter was more intense and profound than anything he expected when he began the project.

As well as working as a costume designer for the cinema and theatre, Rosalie Varda runs Agnès Varda’s family production company, Ciné-Tamaris, based in Rue Daguerre in Paris.

Kimmo Koskela is a director, visual artist and producer. His films blur the borders between documentary and film d’artiste, and demonstrate a very personal world. None of which rules out encounters: The film Still Not There, with Arno Rafael Minkkinen, attests to great creative complicity. Complicity and a relationship with photography that the director addresses for us...

He is a major photographic artist, exhibited internationally many times, collected by the greatest museums. Arno Rafael Minkkinen bares his world for DK2R in an exceptional first interview, a mix of aesthetic musings and personal reflections. All adorned with what Michel Tournier called a "ripple" of humour, erudite and tender. 

Jane Evelyn Atwood is an independent woman and photographer whose freedom has been forged both through her experiences and the struggles she wages in life to protect her creative space.  But this freedom is tenuous. It must be regained with each act, each decision, each gesture and it requires unfailing integrity and authenticity. Freedom is not easy. It is a constant vigil of the self and others in a relationship of otherness that must be reinvented with each event, each encounter and each commitment.

From the film's opening frames, Thomas Goupille plunges us into another world and another time: the workshop of the famous Fresson dynasty, master printers of photographs since 1899. The enlarger and the wooden frames from the nineteenth century, the Roberval balance, now only found at antique dealers, kitchen pans, as well as the machine that spreads gelatine on the paper, invented by great-grandfather along with the process: these are still working instruments. But by etching their era and their technical protocols in the printing process, they anchor the Fressons in the field of artistic craftsmanship, in the wake of a family tradition of quality, creativity and unique pieces, in contrast to a contemporary world sucked in by quantity, technological productivity and profit. 

The director Mathieu le Lay revisits his work for us. We find out to what extent his film on the work of Alexandre Deschaumes stems from a commitment to (and humility before) nature that he shares with the photographer.

He's not keen on legends under photographs, pregnant with meaning. Nor is he keen on the "legendary photographer" tag. "Plo" doesn't stand on ceremony. He doesn't need to. He avoids interviews, because what matters is in his photos, and talking about the rest is of secondary importance. "Photography for photography's sake." Confidences and comments are reserved for friends and family. His words have the same accuracy as his photographic writing; lucid, direct. 

Bernard Plossu isn't usually very forthcoming. Each word reveals the coherence of a reasoned worldview, studded by aesthetic references. DK2R had the opportunity to ask him about printing, and his answers extend this central subject of the photographic act.

In general, things start in a room.  This is certainly true of the birth of photography. When Nicephore Niepce made his first attempts to capture an image, revealing to the world the famous view "from my window", the light must have crossed the room then the camera obscura.

Dominique Roland, auteur of the film The Legs of the Saint-Pierre Quarter, has directed an original and erudite film about the work of the artist Pierre Molinier. It comes as no surprise from this enthusiast, who is also director of the Enghien-les-Bains Arts Centre. In this interview, he explains to us the origins of his film.