Anne Rearick — Sète #17
Festival ImageSingulières
Chapelle du Quartier Haut, 34 200, Sète (FRANCE)
From May 24 to June 11, 2017
People, lights. You could say that Sète is all about that under Anne Rearick’s eye. Quite simply, with the immense freedom that is hers, with the flexibility that makes her elegantly wander the square of her frame until she reduces, without limiting it, the space of her experience to this square that becomes magical because it is inexplicable.
Her Sète is inhabited by characters between whom she establishes no hierarchy but with whom she seeks a dialogue of images, hoping that, one beside the other, they will give not a portrait – impossible – of the city, but a good example of her collection of memories of her visits to Sète. Freed from any globalizing project, she lets everyone express themselves in turn with looks, poses, gestures, movement, and she is precisely reviving this profoundly humanistic photography which never looks at her navel, which does not seek its ego or its identity but goes to meet the other, its equal.
This photography, so far from the staging that calls for devices – and means – closer to the cinema than to a photographic tradition, is becoming increasingly rare today, it is no longer in tune, it seems, with a demand, even a demand for the spectacular that is asserting itself in all fields. Yet this attitude refers back to the fundamentals of photography, to an attitude without arrogance in relation to reality, to a form of humility on the part of those who know that, for the image to be possible, it has been necessary for elements, objects, forms, people and lights to exist in the world they experience and pass through, before any release.
André Kertesz used to say: “I photograph little things”. Anne Rearick, today, reminds me of him. And that’s a lot.
Christian Caujolle
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