Guest of the Planche(s) Contact festival, French photographer and portraitist Dominique Issermann sublimates the beach of Deauville with her powerful photos.
Dominique Issermann, guest of the Planches Contact festival
Launched fifteen years ago, Contact Boards is much more than just a photography festival. This unique event celebrates visual art while paying homage to the unique identity of Deauville, the city that hosts it. Through its open-air exhibitions and immersive installations, the festival establishes a dialogue between the eyes of the artists and the very special atmosphere of this legendary seaside resort.
Each year, a renowned photographer is invited to take over an emblematic space: the famous beach lined with legendary wooden planks, a true symbol of Deauville and its international aura. Their works dialogue with the environment, transforming familiar places into real open-air galleries.
For the 2024 edition, it is the turn of Dominique Issermannan immense French photographer and portraitist, to sublimate the natural setting of Deauville. His photos will rise like imposing monoliths on the white sand, capturing the essence of his subjects in a mixture of power and sensitivity. With his timeless gaze, Dominique Issermann is part of the prestigious lineage of artists who have marked the festival, succeeding masters of photography such as Robert Doisneau, Malick Sidibé, Raymond Depardon, Martin Parr, Koto Bolofo et Peter Lindbergh.
Planches Contact 2024 promises an extraordinary artistic experience, where photographic works, in resonance with the landscape, invite a poetic and sensory immersion in the heart of contemporary art.
An exhibition on Deauville beach
Since its beginnings in the late 1960s, Dominique Issermann has established herself as a major figure in photography, building a career punctuated by prestigious projects and unforgettable collaborations. On the sets of films Jean-Luc Godardshe captured the essence of auteur cinema, while her iconic campaigns for legendary houses such as Chanel or Yves Saint Laurent have redefined the codes of elegance and refinement. She also made music history with her timeless music videos for Leonard Cohenand immortalized cinema icons like Catherine Deneuve et Isabelle Adjani in portraits imbued with grace and mystery. At the same time, she has signed fashion series that transcend trends to touch on the timeless.
Today, his monumental photographs, exhibited on the beach of Deauville as part of the festival Contact Boardsoffer a new perspective on his exceptional work. Like mirages emerging from the sand, these black and white images, of rare evocative power, transport us into a universe that is both dreamlike and poetic.
Through the light, shadows and silences that she captures, Dominique Issermann invites us to a unique visual and emotional experience, where each shot resonates like a timeless work, suspended between dream and reality.
Dominique Issermann presents his first film Lyrics
Alongside the monumental installation of Dominique Issermann on Deauville beach, the festival Contact Boards exclusively reveals his new film, Lyrics. This surprising rear tracking shot retraces the artist’s unique journey through carefully selected archive extracts.
In this new film, Dominique Issermann questions the role of memory and fragmented memories, poetically evoking the forgotten archives that have resurfaced: “Fallen from the sky, brought back from the archive cellar, the silent films – 3 minutes 20 seconds of images, single 8 format – suddenly impose themselves on me like mysterious missing links, always missing, because a very large number remains untraceable… If you find reels that are looking for me, think of the pleasure I would have to find them. THANKS.”
A work that questions memory and memories
More Lyrics is not content to be a simple documentary or a making-of. Built around black and white photos published between 1980 and 1995, the film interweaves these photographs with single 8 sequences shot simultaneously. For Issermann, this process took the form of a rediscovery: “It was like picking ripe fruit from a tree, a walk in a forgotten park to which you had lost the key. Chains of tangled memories, carefully untangled, ghosts and fairies dance from the flat Camargue to the banks of the Nile.”
Here, the sensory experience of the film is enhanced by the original soundtrack Nick Cave et Warren Ellistaken from their sumptuous composition for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford by Andrew Dominic. Thus, their music, combining bursts of light and stormy rumblings, breathes Lyrics a captivating dimension, mixing nostalgia and artistic sublimation.
Eventually, Dominique Issermann here signs a unique work, at the crossroads of the intimate and the universal, a dive into a world where memories dance and whisper, carried by the grace of cinema and photography.
Contact Boards, from October 19, 2024 to January 5, 2025 in Deauville. More information on plankscontact.
