Opening Friday Oct. 23 th 7 pm
 
AZIMUT
 
[from the Arab (as-)simt, the path ],
March – Octobre 2017
A photographic journey.
In France.
 
French photography has a new found sense of freedom. The Tendance Floue photographer’s collective grew tired of the constraints of commissioned work, and were eager to get back the feeling of independence that defined the movement’s origins, so they decided to go on a road-trip. The idea was to travel around in a relay, exploring the countryside, wandering aimlessly through the cities and towns. Their only requirement was to move forward a little every day and to document their impressions of the road in words and images, before passing the baton on to another photographer. The idea was not to take a break, but to open a window on the world.
 
 At the time, the Tendance Floue collective was about 25 years old, a quarter of a century in other words. That crucial age where freedom meets maturity. Everything is possible at that age. It is the time we break free to travel the world, when we define and appropriate a place, alone or with friends.

The members of the collective invited other photographers to share their road-trip experience. With the new-found freedom of Azimut, the collective came into its own. One echoed the other.
 
The unprecedented six-month relay-journey involved fifteen members of the collective and sixteen guest photographers. Travelling without a specific aim is what defines any adventure. While the path taken was incidental and the destination unimportant, documenting the Azimut was the one rule everyone had to follow. A Moleskine notebook was handed from traveller to traveller like a relay baton, forming a common thread between the photographers. Travelling meant knowing when to stop, to be able to write, comment, express their fears, share their encounters and, at times, log their dreams. The story of the journey is told in both photographs and words. Social media kept a daily track of their activities as each day, a photograph was posted to an Instagram account with comments from the photographer. The project was also recorded in self-published notebooks, almost in real time, anchoring it very much in its time.
 
The French landscape has already been extensively documented photographically, from the Mission héliographique that began in 1851, to DATAR in 1984 to France Territoire Liquide in 2017. Tendance Floue reinvented the genre and took it outside the box, without waiting for the next institutional campaign. Everyone was free to choose their own path, literally and figuratively; they were even free to get lost, all the better to trace an instinctive cartography of the landscapes they travelled through. Azimut gives us an unfettered look of a territory in the concrete sense of the term, while also exploring the personal territories of the artists. It forms a collective trail that makes room for each individual to express themselves.
 
With:
Bertrand Meunier,
Grégoire Eloy,
Gilles Coulon,
Meyer,
Antoine Bruy,
Pascal Aimar,
Alain Willaume,
Patrick Tourneboeuf,
Mat Jacob,
Kourtney Roy,
Pascal Dolémieux,
Michel Bousquet,
Julien Magre,
Stéphane Lavoué,
Léa Habourdin,
Fred Stucin,
Marine Lanier,
Clémentine Schneidermann,
Mouna Saboni,
Guillaume Chauvin,
Yann Merlin,
Gabrielle Duplantier,
Olivier Culmann,
Bertrand Desprez,
Julien Mignot,
Thierry Ardouin,
Yohanne Lamoulère,
Marion Poussier,
Denis Bourges,
Flore-Aël Surun,
Laure Flammarion
and Nour Sabbagh
 
Curated by:
Anne-Céline Borey, Sylvain Besson, musée Nicéphore Niépce
 
All of the prints in the exhibition were printed in the Musée Nicéphore Niépce’s laboratory on Canson paper Imaging, Photo Mat Paper 180 g and Infinity, Rag Photographique 310 g.
 
The museum would like to thank:
Canson, The Société des Amis du musée Nicéphore Niépce, all the members of the Tendance Floue collective and their guests, in particular Clémentine Semeria, Grégoire Eloy, Bertrand Meunier and Fred Boucher.
 
 Edition:
 Azimut
 Éditions Textuel
 ISBN : 978-2-84597-821-8
 17 x 23 cm
 288 pages
 35 €