Arte Distribution

Mexico is regularly in the headlines around the world. Despite drowning in violence and corruption, Mexico is also a symbol of resistance and a reservoir of creativity embodied by its cinema, its visual arts and also by its photographers.

These committed, creative and tireless artists and researchers will tell us about Mexico today and its challenges in the turbulent and complicated landscape of the 21st century.

Mexico is regularly in the headlines around the world. Despite drowning in violence and corruption, Mexico is also a symbol of resistance and a reservoir of creativity embodied by its cinema, its visual arts and also by its photographers.

These committed, creative and tireless artists and researchers will tell us about Mexico today and its challenges in the turbulent and complicated landscape of the 21st century.

Mumbai, Kolkata, New Delhi: Building cities to introduce modernity to the country was one of the wishes of India’s first Prime Minister, Nehru.

All hailing from these metropolises that are emblematic of growth in India, the photographers Sameer Tawde, Saibal Das, and Ravi Agarwal guide us on a journey from the historical city centers to the distant suburbs.
The film explores the sprawling world-city of Mumbai; the vestige of British rule that is Kolkata; and the city-within-a-city, given how New Delhi has swallowed up ancient Delhi, illustrating the brutal rupture between the urban environment and nature, especially the great sacred rivers, places of worship for Hindus.

They have shot to fame as the photographers of Chinese fashion and contemporary art.

In Beijing, Shanghai and Hong-Kong, 3 figures of the visual avant-garde capture a China in the throes of an aesthetic revolution. From photo shoots with favourite actrice Fan Bingbing, to the glamour photos of GQ China - welcome to the studios where the future canons of Chinese beauty are being revealed.

From the great North’s snows to the Bering Strait, the Russian territory’s borders blend in with the continent’s. Numerous Russian provinces are hard to reach. In those harsh environments, geographical isolation amounts to being culturally and socially on the fringe.

Elena Anosova is a photographer from a remote village at the border with Mongolia. Her geographical origin resonates deeply with her work – centered on the question of isolation. Then we discover Sakhalin Island – on the eastern edge of Russia – with Oleg Klimov; the island embodies multiple fringes of Russian society. In 1890, Anton Chekhov spent three months there and wrote “Sakhalin Island” – a literary account of the exiles’ lives in which he details their horrid living conditions. As for Dmitri Markov, he attempts to put faces on today’s exiles by going to poor suburbs and forgotten provinces – which are as many places of exclusion and isolation. Then we meet Igor Moukhine in a large abandoned factory which doubles as a bohemian and decadent workshop squatted by contemporary artists. After the festive enthusiasm of the post-soviet era, the country seems to be closing up again: repression, censorship and self-censorship symbolically re-erect an opaque curtain at the Russian borders. Will today’s young artists be able to crack it like their elders did?

The real treasures of Russia are often hidden within remote places. Some photographers set out on journeys to faraway lands; others scour their daily life. But they are all looking for the same thing: the real Russia – its body, its soul, its myth. 

Russia’s urbanization discrepancies are striking: 93% of the population lives on a third of the territory. The big cities continue to gather more and more of the Russian population as they are seeking more comfort and modernity. Beyond the urban border there is scarcely anyone: in some places, population density does not exceed one person per square kilometer. But it is in those remote, isolated places, far from everything and with few infrastructures, that you will find Russia’s real treasures. Far from a rosy, smooth and seamless picture, you will find a modern tale that mirrors reality: sometimes weird, crazy, sad, eerie, elusive… The Russian spirit lives on with the locals, on their lands, in its own time and with its own history. 

Until very recently, the Indian lifestyle was one of community, but the move towards greater individualism has inspired the work of some increasingly introspective photographers.

A pioneer of this new intimate approach, Pablo Bartholomew has produced a dense body of work, based on his youth in the libertarian India of the 1970s and 80s. In his wake, Atul Loke has become a key witness of the disappearance of collective life by always photographing the building where he grew up. This immersion in the collective Indian psyche intensifies with the work of Sohrab Hura, whose private journal documenting his mother’s schizophrenia caused a sensation in a society where the maternal figure remains absolutely sacred.

Sensitive witnesses of their country and society, young Chinese, Indian and Russian photographers provide their vision of their countries. Extraordinary images to better understand the clamor of an era.

This documentary series takes us on the trail of artists who travel around China, camera in hand. With a strikingly modern perspective, they bear witness to the upheaval their country is experiencing.
This series also opens windows onto contemporary India through pioneering photographic works that question the country regarding the massive social changes it went through.
Then, while impossible to produce an exhaustive portrait of Russia, this series provides an unusual take on this intriguing land that challenges modern representations.

Every snapshot is an enigma, the capture of an instant that remains frozen in time. But what happened before? and after? Or just outside of frame? The sublime series now retraces the adventure of this art form, from its beginnings to the present, revealing the hidden stories and trade secrets concealed in a series of photographs.

Every photograph is an enigma. A moment locked into a rectangle. We will never know what happened just before it was taken, or just next to it.
What had to be moved, adjusted, waited for or provoked for all the elements to suddenly come together in the frame and produce an image that once seen, is never forgotten?

Compared to painting, the rules of the photography game are incredibly simple, requiring nothing more than a few pieces in a minimalist game of chess - a subject, a frame, light, a lens, a shutter, and a base. The importance of these pieces varies according to their position, and they are moved around permanently in relation to each other.

The collection invites viewers to discover from the inside "how it's done", and imagine themselves as actors in the complex game that is played out between photography and the real.
 

The Contacts collection is an invitation to discover the artistic approach of the greatest contemporary photographers from an original angle. Through a series of images (contact sheets, proofs, prints and slides), with a commentary by the photographer, the viewer enters the secret world of their creation and is guided into the heart of the photographic creative process.

CONTACTS is a collection of films about contemporary photography. Each film traces the development of an individual photographer. With the help of the programme director, the photographer puts together a retrospective, selecting images from his or her contact sheets, proof prints and end-prints to show how his or her work has changed in character and meaning over the years.
Photographers use contact sheets and proofs of various kinds as an aid to memory or a log-book. Exploring these visual jottings provides us with an invaluable insight into their working methods.
Over the years, the initial concept of the collection has evolved. CONTACTS now includes major contemporary artists like Sophie Calle, Jeff Wall, Nan Goldin and Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose work makes use of photographic techniques, alongside famous photo-journalists like William Klein, Helmut Newton, Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson. CONTACTS has become an international reference for all those who are interested in contemporary photography.

3 DVD released by ARTE Video

2000 : Certificat Of Merit Winner au Festival International Du Film De San Francisco for NAN GOLDIN. 1999 : Mention Spéciale à Vue Sur Les Docs for NAN GOLDIN. 1994 : Golden FIPA for SARAH MOON. 1993 : Prix du Meilleur Film de Jeunes au Festival du Court-métrage De Tampere for DON MCCULLIN. 1992 : Mention Spéciale at the Festival International Du Documentaire - Visions Du Réel (Nyon) for DON MCCULLIN.

This documentary follows 200 days in life of the contemporary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto - a leading presence in the world of modern art. He has taken the medium of photography and perceiving it as a form of conceptual art, has extended the barriers of expression.

He is the winner of many prestigious awards and his photographs are sold for millions of yen at overseas auctions.

The film shows the sites of the Architecture series shot in southern France, the huge installation art work at 17th Biennale of Sydney, his new work Mathematics at Provence, his art studio at New York while working on Lightning Fields, his recent direction and production of tradition Japanese performance art and so on.

It thoroughly pursues the question Sugimoto's works pose - "living in modern times, what are these works trying to tell us?" A thrilling look into the world of Hiroshi Sugimoto.

David Bailey is a cultural icon who has been at the cutting-edge of contemporary art for 50 years.

From Vogue magazine fashion photographer to filmmaker, painter and sculptor, Bailey is the working-class Londoner who befriended the stars (Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Jack Nicholson, Roman Polanski), married his muses (Jean Shrimpton, Catherine Deneuve, Marie Helvin) and captures the spirit and elegance of his times with his refreshingly simple approach and razor-sharp eye.

He is also the man whose life and work inspired one of the cult movies of the sixties, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up.

Featuring interviews with art critic Martin Harrison, Bailey's former wife Catherine Deneuve, his current wife of over twenty years Catherine Dyer, and his close friend Jerry Hall, Jérôme de Missolz's documentary is an engaging portrait of this very private man who bared the soul of the swinging sixties and seventies with his photographs and films. Grounded, honest, open and ferociously creative, Bailey makes art the way Count Basie played jazz: Four beats to the bar and no cheating.