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See Images Differently

See Images Differently

Asako Narahashi Kawaguchiko from Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water series, 2003 Courtesy of Osiris Co

Festival Images Vevey took over the city. It displayed contemporary photography on building facades, in parks and gardens, and floating on Lake Geneva. It gave artists a rare chance to show work on mammoth scales and, also, made a leap in presenting images differently. ‘The Vevey urban environment is a curatorial challenge. We try to find the right picture for the right place’ says festival director Stefano Stoll. Vevey is a small town, eighteen kilometres from Lausanne. It’s famous for being the home of Charlie Chaplin and the base for Nestlé Headquarters. The fifth biennale, Festival Images Vevey ran from 10 September to 2 October 2016. A free event, it comprised seventy-five projects from fifteen countries, some but not all responding to the theme of ‘immersion’. In party mood, the public toured the locations, stopping off at the bar covered in Swiss artist Beni Bischof’s photomontages of found images, among them pictures of models with sausages for noses (the sausage is an icon in Switzerland).

The dynamic director, Stoll, was Head of Cultural Affairs for Vevey (2004–2015) when he was asked to rethink the existing festival. ‘Festival Images Vevey was created at the end of the 1990s, when the city chose an urban marketing concept called ‘city of images’, he says.

Multimedia artist, Mat Collishaw, showed In Camera that uses negatives from a crime scene placed in the attic of the Vevey History Museum. Phosphorescent ink caused the images to appear under flashes out of the darkened room.

Flat photography was transformed into objects. Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water was set up on floating structures on Lake Geneva. The series by Asako Narahashi shows Mount Fuji, viewed from Lake Kawaguchiko, taken with her Nikonos 35mm, waterproof film camera while swimming.

The Italian still-life photographer Guido Mocafico, who was born in Switzerland and studied photography at the Educational Centre in Vevey (CEPV), ambitiously held an underwater exhibition in the depths of Lake Geneva. His photographs, seen through virtualreality headsets, showed glass models of marine invertebrates made by glassblowers from Bohemia for natural history museums.

One of Stoll’s aims is to show ‘the power of narrative in photography’ apparent in Christian Patterson’s immersive installation of a closed – down grocery store in Mississippi, Gong County. Housed in an exhibition space, the recreation was dotted with furniture and products from the original store, alongside Patterson’s photographs questioning consumerism.

Vevey is fertile ground for putting works in contexts that add to meaning. Martin Parr’s Think of Switzerland, exhibited on the side of a bank blending with the Alpine landscape, sums up stereotypes about the country: finance and mountains. In this spot could have been a commercial advert for the bank but, instead, hangs an image by one of England’s pre-eminent photographers; boosting Vevey’s image, engaging people and changing the shape of art festivals.

Artist: Asako Narahashi Tokyo–based earned a degree from the School of Letters, Art, and Science of Waseda University in 1989. She began exploring photography as an art student and is now represented by ROSEGALLERY in California. In 2001, Narahashi began the series Half Asleep and Half Awake in the Water. The artist’s first solo show in America was at Yossi Milo Gallery in 2008 and, in 2016, her images of Mount Fuji seen from Lake Kawaguchiko were shown at Festival Images Vevey.

Artist: Guido Mocafico is an Italian still life photographer, who was born in Switzerland and studied photography in Vevey. He has a studio in Paris and is represented by Hamiltons Gallery in London and Bernheimer gallery in Munich. He initially focused on commercial projects but, about twenty years ago, started exploring his own work. Both Blaschka and 101 Packshots – showing his collection of perfume bottles – went on display at Festival Images Vevey.

Artist: Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger have worked in Zurich for fifteen years and began collaborating during their studies at Zurich University of the Arts. Icons is a project they have been developing since 2012, recreating thirty historic and political images and simultaneously showing their ‘making’. The series went on show at Gallery East–Wing, Dubai (2016) and at Festival Images Vevey their images were shown outdoors on metallic structures similar to those used in their workshop. They are the winners of the Broncolor Prize (Light), 2015–16.

Artist: Mat Collishaw is one of several key British artists who attended Goldsmiths College in London in the late 1980s. His practice includes sculpture, photography, film and installation. Recent exhibitions include a solo–show at The New Art Gallery Walsall, West Midlands (2015). In Camera was shown at the Library of Birmingham (2015) and travelled to Festival Images Vevey (2016). He also showed The End of Innocence, a digital recreation of a papal portrait, at the festival.

Writer: Ellie Parsons is a freelance journalist and copywriter who lives between Lyon, France and Bristol. She guest–lectures on copywriting and fashion communication at the University of the West of England and also writes for various commercial brands. She has explored much of the French border with Switzerland, living next to the mountains in Annecy, hiking around Mont Blanc and staying at La Petite Échelle during the freezing winter in a cabin where there’s no electricity.