Photography (BA)

Teachers: Antoine Meyer, Camille Picquot, Agnès Villette

Both in art and narration clusters, this workshop will try to reconcile the learning of photographic tools with the need to rethink, push the limits, the canons that punctuate this medium. It will be a question of exploring the field of photography as an artistic form and inviting students to cultivate an approach that is at once curious, transgressive and forward-looking.

The contemporary practice of photography induces crossings between chemical and digital processes, appropriations and circulations of images. Each student will experience their complexity both as pragmatic recordings of the world, and as products of subjectivity and theatricality.

From the modernity of a “shot”, to the advent of a “data” and its code, embedded by surveillance, the intelligence of a machine or generative antagonistic networks; we will be attentive to these dialectics of the image as artefacts and potential works.

The photography workshop is a place where students understand and participate in a pedagogy where the community has meaning.

The teaching method is deployed in several approaches, temporalities and geometries in relation to the progress of the work within the group:

- critical exchanges around presentations of images, statements and then renderings of exercises

- shooting and post-production sessions (dev/scan, modeling, processing, printing)

- individual meetings, follow-up of projects and personal work, alternated with group discussions

- visits to exhibitions and meetings with guest artists

Bachelor 1

The first year consists of experimenting with relationships to reality in several contexts and using different image production tools. It is thus a question of engaging a photographic practice, but also of desacralizing it. Beyond the necessary technical learning, it is above all curiosity and critical thinking that are cultivated there.

Bachelor 2 & 3

The pedagogical approach of the individual meeting develops with each student as they invest in the collective. A space for dialogue around images is particularly cultivated in bac 2: either around images during critical readings, or through involvement in the management of common tools within the workshop. In Bac3, students are encouraged to focus on the post-production of their images, and pool their knowledge of common production tools. The commons presuppose image techniques (studio, laboratory, digitization, printing), as well as the development of historical and theoretical resources, the collection and formatting of which are essential to feeding a group of work as a breeding ground, an open place for sharing.

A contemporary practice of the photographic medium supposes crossings between chemical and digital processes, appropriations and circulation of images, in order to encourage the emergence of new dialectical dimensions. The versatility of the photo tool is approached as a means of processing the real as well as the imaginary. When reviewing photo practices in artistic scenes, students will be encouraged to reconsider their production of images as the expression of plastic forms, even performatives.

The proposal to bring together the years Bac 2 and 3, in a working group where different speakers will accompany the singularity of the trajectories of each student.

The course is fed by presentations (images, audiovisual documents, digitized books to consult, critical texts and image analyses). Non-linear tools such as mind maps are used to better understand the history of the photo medium and its roots in artistic scenes. Most of the content is made available, shared online to allow each student to return to the subject at their own pace. A footer, in the form of an aggregated list of web links and educational content, is updated regularly and added to each e-mail exchanged.