The Images festival, which takes place every two years in Vevey (Switzerland), on the shores of Lake Geneva, has five specificities: presenting only living artists, between stars and young people, photography and contemporary art, from 20 countries; hanging half of the fifty exhibitions outdoors (building facades, panels planted in the city) and with care; finding a match between each project and the installation location; registering the entire program under an aesthetic project; favoring discovery over retrospective exhibition.
This ninth edition, entitled “(dis)connected”, explores how digital technologies, and now artificial intelligence, blur the past, present and future. The result is of very high quality, making Vevey one of the very first visual arts festivals in the world.
Besides Paul Graham, other notable projects include:
Sasha Kurmaz created, from photos and poor materials, more than three hundred collages, presented in a frieze that shows how the war disrupts the landscape and life in Ukraine. This project won the Grand Prix Images Vevey 2023-2024.
The British Oliver Frank Chanarin photographs different social groups in the post-Brexit United Kingdom. One hundred and fifty images are exhibited randomly: a robotic arm chooses them, removes them from the wall, changes their place according to an impenetrable algorithm. Or how robotics imposes itself on humans and mixes past and future.
With One Last Journey, Alexey Chernikov uses Midjourney software to generate Polaroid images depicting a couple’s last trip before their separation. Disturbing.
The Catalan photographer Anna Gali reconstructed through images the journey of her son Tomeu, who died in 2017 of an overdose at the age of 18. She discovered his hidden life on social networks and how he tested drugs. Her book Time on Quaaludes and Red Wine won the Special Jury Prize of the Prix du livre Images Vevey 2023-2024.
As you leave Vevey station, you come across a giant tarpaulin covering a building, which represents the Aletsch glacier in Switzerland, photographed thirty years ago by Andreas Gursky. For this edition, the same Gursky photographed the glacier again. The ravages of global warming with the naked eye.
A portrait painter based in New York, the Swiss Henry Leutwyler was able to photograph the thousands of personal objects that the American photographer Philippe Halsman (1906-1979), to whom we owe one hundred and one covers of the magazine Lifebrought together during his career. An astonishing visual portrait.
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