Anne Rearick — Pays Basque & Township

Festival du Regard 2019
Tour EDF de Cergy-Pontoise, Parvis de la Préfecture, 95 000, Cergy-Pontoise (France)
From May 24 to July 14, 2019

Within the scope of the 4th edition of the Festival du Regard focusing this year on the theme of occupied environment, the American photographer Anne Rearick will display two extracts from her series “Pays Basque” and “Township”.

In 1990 Anne Rearick leaved American East Coast and spent one year to photograph rural life in the Basque Country of southwest France. Since then, she has returned at least twice a year. In Iparralde, far from big cities’ tumult, time stood. Anne Rearick seeks to capture moments of authenticity and purity.

For ten years, she photographed the same people, in the same township next to Cape Town in South Africa. Her photographs depict a daily life that did not really change since the end of apartheid. However, they show another reality. There is no violence or shocking pictures in her images, but “humane” and in fact “poetic” photographs.

In a sober and graceful black and white, we see the same profound empathy and the sincere relationships she has built with the people she photographs, whose habits and environment are significantly different.