ARTE Distribution

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.

Lee Miller was an American photographer, and served as model and muse to Man Ray. She died in 1977.

Sylvain Roumette brings this exceptional and true adventuress in photography back to life, a woman who said never to have lost a minute of her life. Her son and the photographer David Scherman guide us through the life and career of Lee Miller from her first steps as a nude model photographed by her father, and then by Man Ray, to the series of photographs that she took of Montparnasse in the thirties and the ones as a war correspondent.

Released on DVD by ARTE VIDEO
Bonus :
Portofolio of Lee Miller's Photography

Focussing on the themes of identity, absence and death, Boltanski uses photography to turn images back into something intensely disturbing and powerful.

Christian Boltanski has created a body of work which does not fit into any of the categories of contemporary art, and in which form cannot be separated from the feelings it generates. Focussing on the themes of identity, absence and death, Boltanski uses photography to turn images back into something intensely disturbing and powerful.

1937 was the last summer before war. Picasso, Man Ray and friends, passionate artists and poets, gathered in the South of France. This is the journey of the end of a great artistic era.

Discover the summer of 1937, in Mougins. This film recounts the end of a great artistic era over one particular summer. Photography, painting, poetry, and cinema were all mixed in the carefree spirit and friendship... But very quickly the war arrived, and everything changed, the world was upended and so was art; the film tells of this epiphany, this ephemeral moment that probably only existed precisely because everyone felt the end of this era was coming.

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.

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.

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.

With Photography being very much in vogue, it is a fitting time to dedicate a film to women photographers and to set the record straight on their little-known talents. ©Judy Dater
 

Ask people to name 5 photographers, from past or present, and the chances are that few will think to name a woman. Yet since Photography was first invented, women have made an incontestable contribution to the art form. 
©Judy Dater, Ms. Clingfree, 1982

In this Islamic Republic,a creative and daring young photographic scene is committed to giving its country a new image to the world. The film presents us with a unique artistic scene in the world – always using humor and metaphor in their work to bypass censorship.

This movie sheds a new light on Iran, a complex country torn between tradition and modernity – a country in which these photographers have chosen to stay, out of passion and pride, despite the difficulties to work tand live here.
The photographers Solmaz Daryani, Gohar Dashti, Shadi Ghadirian, Abbas Kowsari, Tahmineh Monzavi, and Neshwa Tavakolian, will be the main actors of the film. Anahita Ghabaian, one of the most famoust photogallerist of Iran, will be kind of a thread of the film. We follow the photographers on their shootings, in their studios and on different locations. The film will be articulated around their narrative and personal analysis of their ventures, giving us a new insight of this country and its history FOCUSIRAN is a journey from Teheran to Quashan, and up to Lake Urmia, far northwest from Iran, close from the Azerbaidjan frontier.

* Etoile de la Scam (The civil society of multimedia authors) 2018

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.

This documentary offers us, on an original and amusing way, the " trade secret " of the surrealist photography.

Their names are Man Ray, Dora Maar, Alvarez Bravo, Brassai, André Kertesz or Henri Cartier-Bresson. They're counting amongst the greatest photographers of the 20th century.
During the 1930's, their images embodied the most intense and lively side of surrealism.

The images are questionned trough animation techniques. They're dismantled, put back together again, brought back into play. Those images are " brought to life ", showing us the choices, the serendipity and their inner strength.
Each photography shown in the film becomes a story on its own, a little photographic drama who's only ending while reaching the finale picture.
The audience gets inside the process, the work on light and frame, the superimposing, solarisation, photomontage and slowly becomes itself part of this intricate game between photography, imagination and reality.