Every Spring in the South of France, the ‘International Fashion and Photography Festival’ spotlights young promising artists in the fields of fashion and photography. The festival proposes diverse exhibitions, professional panel discussions and two competitions. The competitions showcase 10 fashion designers and 10 photographers selected by a jury of professionals in each field. The work of the chosen candidates is presented to the jury and the public in either fashion shows (designers) or group exhibitions (photographers).
On the last days of the month of April, as every Spring since 1998, the villa Noailles once again became the epicenter for emerging photography. There, in the photography section of the Festival de Hyeres, ten artist-photographers will exhibit their personal conjugation of the verb to see. Hyeres defends and praises photographic works that strive for sense, singularity, innovation and uncompromising artistic standards. The bodies of work spotlighted at Hyeres are still being born. Yet, the articulateness of their aesthetic stances confidently allows us to bet on their projection into the future.
Attentively sorted and short-listed, an imposing lot of nearly 800 worldwide submissions is put under the scrutiny and appraisal of an international jury of professionals that gathers, late January, in Paris. The jury’s choice of the ten photographers to showcase sets in motion an exacting curatorial and production process that will culminate shortly in the unveiling to the public, on the walls of the villa Noailles, of an exciting group exhibition: ten new artistic visions that will help shape the photography of tomorrow.
During the three days of the festival, the selected photographers meet to discuss their exhibited work and ongoing portfolios with the members of the jury. Art dealers, museum curators, art critics, art directors for magazines or advertising agencies, among past Festival jurors we can randomly mention Urs Stahel (Fotomuseum Winterthur), Marloes Krijnen (FOAM, Amsterdam), Dennis Freedman (W, New York), Charlotte Cotton, Glenn O’Brien, Mark Sanders (Another Magazine, London), Marta Gili (Jeu de Paume, Paris), Jorg Koch (032C, Berlin), Frits Gierstberg (Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam), Kathy Ryan (The New York Times, New York), William Ewing (Musee de l’Elysee, Lausanne), Oliviero Toscani, Erik Kessels (KesselsKramer, Amsterdam), etc. Agents, art dealers and art directors, all eager to meet new talent, also attend the Festival.
The Hyeres meetings between artists and jurors render possible an in-depth discussion — elsewhere highly improbable — about the photographer’s work and its potentialities. An intellectually intense exchange between photographers and key figures of the artistic and commercial spheres, these one to one meetings have often proved fruitful opening for the photographers the doors to different media, from the pages of a magazine to the walls of a museum or an advertising campaign.
