the essential
Morad Cherchari, journalist photographer and artist at heart, and Annie T. Lormonth, visual photographer, are exhibiting their travel diaries and languages from elsewhere at the Montreurs d’images until January 31. Emotions and swear words translated into images. Two very beautiful series entitled “Moments prolongés” and “Enguirlander”.
The images from the series “Prolonged Moments” by our colleague Morad Cherchari, journalist for the Dépêche du Midi group and traveling photographer, reveal silver vibrations for which the light was not always offered, but random, twilight, at the limits of the night.
Captured in low light, captured at slow speeds, these photographs then offer us chromatic, vibrant fibrillations, enclosing within them what remains secret in the small lights of day. So many luminous reminiscences of his wanderings from 1991 to 1998 in Pakistan, Nepal and especially in India. In Calcutta, Agra, Lahore, Bombay, Srinagar in Kashmir, Kerala and Dharamshala. “One day my camera got stuck, the speed was too slow, not enough light,” he confides as the starting point for this experiment. But from this accident, once the film had been developed, some interesting images were revealed which encouraged him “to push the limits of the film, by pausing for a long time, which changed the chromaticism”.
Armed with a Minolta 300, then 500 and 700 throughout his travels, “always a camera at hand”, he works on film and the characters remain crucial in his photographic quests. “I move at the same time as the subject, I follow it, or I stand still. Sometimes the light is superimposed in several places”, giving a cleverly aesthetic blur. “I then scanned my color slides. Each photograph tells a story on the fly. The subject is also invariably the color that imposes itself on my gaze and the blue of the early evening that I overexpose a little.” He loves the sunset, the blue hour, the atmosphere between dog and wolf, immortalizing for this series of 22 works, a beach in Kerala, the Chinese nets of fishermen, Tibetan monks who hold preciously in their hands like offerings, AIR mail letters received from families on their remote hillside of McLeod Ganj in the Kangra district… The series is an ode to mauves, midnight blue, madder red with a dreamlike scope.
This photographer who reports images in life, brings added value through the prism of his artistic sensitivity to “always offbeat reporting”, he claims, having an eye for details, the poetry of things, the reflections, giving strength, beauty and grace to the images. He is also a lover of the Garonne and the footbridge captured from every angle in the fading day or in the blazing sun. He has exhibited at the Florida, at the Martrou for Exposante Fixe, at the Odac, at the Artothèque and as part of the Photapie workshop. Travels to Lebanon, Norway, Algeria, Morocco, Cape Verde and Portugal were also sources of photographic stories.
Illuminated, photographed and colored swear words
Photo Annie T. Lormonth
After presiding over eight editions of the “Rendez-vous Photographiques d’Agen”, a series of exhibitions scattered throughout the city including the Martrou chapel, Annie T. Lormonth signed an exhibition “The Being of My Machine” at Les Montreurs in January 2024. “. Black and white photographs captured by his Leica, with the only object becoming the “main subject”, his Brunsviga typewriter.
This time, the artist from Passage who rubbed shoulders with Dieuzaide at the Château d’eau in Toulouse, brings back from her trips to the darkroom a collection of international insults. “Whether they come from Albania, South Korea or the Zulu country, the swear words form a poetics of rudeness throwing explosive sparks into our tied languages. To these proletarians of the conversation, she mentions, I offers an illumination of distinction. Christmas garlands which form under his fingers the words “flowers” which they illuminate for the black and white shots, before colorizing the photos with oil pastels. The supports (paper, textiles, etc.) of the words are always linked to the country of swearing and the series is called “enguirlander”. “The attempt was to accentuate the contrast between the content of the not really nice message derived from “fuck” in several languages and its bloated, even rococo rendering. There is also the attempt to make a word become an image. I conducts research in linguistics and I love the green language”.
From January 9 to 31 at the Montreurs bar – Free entry
