Franck Gérard
photographe
Franck Gérard est né à Poitiers en 1972 et il est diplômé de l’école des Beaux-Arts de Nantes. Son travail a notamment été présenté au Lieu Unique à Nantes, au Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Morbihan, à la Fondation d’entreprise Ricard à Paris, au centre Georges Pompidou-Metz, au Centre national d’art et du paysage de Vassivière en Limousin, au MAC USP de São Paulo ou encore aux Rencontres Internationales de la photographie d’Arles en 2006 et 2010.
Calanques Frontières
Franck Gérard
During 2018 and 2019, Franck Gérard was invited to stay several times at the Camargo Foundation, located in the heart of the exceptional and protected site of the famous Calanques of Marseille. As usual, the photographer immersed himself in the landscape, photographing people, places, and situations he encountered during his daily walks.
As in his book En l'état, he always knows how to highlight a comical situation or reveal a view of incredible beauty to his audience.
He continued what he now often develops in the projects he undertakes: he accompanies his photography with writing, somewhere between a work journal and a literary narrative. Lively and earthy, light and serious like his photographic gaze, his writing draws the reader into his encounters, sharing his impressions and sensations.
The journal format was the obvious choice. A book in which we discover the Calanques through a narrative that weaves its way through the pages between photographs and text. A book in which image and text reinforce each other.
Calanques Frontières
12.5 x 19 cm, 384 pages, approximately 200 four-color reproductions, paperback
In partnership with the Calanques National Park, the Pytheas Institute, and the Camargo Foundation.
Graphic design: Arthur Calame
ISBN: ISBN : 978-2-843140-68-6
En l’état
Franck Gérard
As it stands, this is an evolving work, a work in progress, begun on July 13, 1999, after Franck Gérard nearly died. Since then, the artist's photographic practice has radically changed: the image has become a vital, incessant act, and the thousands of accumulated photographs have come to constitute a state of seeing the world, also positing a state of the world. The notion of abundance, of an overflow of images, affirms a presence in the world grounded in perception. Through an observation of reality that is as methodical as it is haphazard, linked to the artist's wanderings in public spaces, Franck Gérard captures situations without preconceptions or preconceptions: offering simply "what he sees." More observer than interventionist, the photographer's eye draws up, territory after territory, city after city, a veritable lexicon with a universal vocation where the slightest incongruous gesture, the slightest banal or extraordinary situation, the slightest incident, are listed as so many states constituting our daily life, and through it, the very movement of the world as it goes, as it is.
En l’état
17 x 24 cm, 428 pages + 24-page booklet, approximately 300 reproductions, paperback with flaps.
Co-produced with SPL Le Voyage à Nantes, the Pays de la Loire region, IDM-Groupe Coupechoux, Mélanie Rio Fluency, and Cetih.
Texts by Franck Gérard, as well as Dominique A, Philippe Bazin, Jean-Christophe Béchet, Jean Blaise, Ronan Bouroullec, Blandine Chavanne, Gilles Clément, Julie Corteville, Olivier Delavallade, Françoise de Maulde, Raymond Depardon, François Hébel, Jean-Yves Jouannais, Jacques Leenhardt, Laurent Le Bon, David Moinard, Jean-Luc Moulène, Michel Poivert, Mélanie Rio, Guy Tortosa, and Felice Varini.
Graphic design: Jean Depagne
ISBN: 978-2-84314-031-0