Gilles Coulon is invited this year in residency in Vichy for the 5th edition of the Festival Portrait (s), member of Tendance Floue he approaches the city with a resolutely humanist eye. During these winter months of 2018, those moments of respite during which the city pauses, Gilles Coulon was interested in the inside, the inner life of the Vichys, their relationship to others, their relationship to the world.
In association with the CAVILAM-Alliance Française, a teaching center of French as a foreign language of international reference, which welcomes every year more than 4 000 trainees and foreign students in Vichy, he was able to enter the houses, the kitchens, the rooms and piercing the intimacy of these host families and uprooted students time for an apprenticeship.
The result of these closed-door meetings is a series of contrasting portraits that mix modesty, sharing, exile, everyday life and elsewhere.
In these private spaces, Gilles Coulon tells us about the fragility and strength of the link that connects people. Their ability to live together and understand each other against all odds. Their resilience.
He gives us powerful portraits that remind us of who we are. A poetic and generous work that captures the invisible. No Lost in Translation here. The language is that of the soul.
This series of photos is on display at the Portrait (s) festival from June 16 to September 10, 2018.
Since the 2014 edition, the festival Portrait (s) organized by the city of Vichy hosts, for a month, a photographer in residence.
After Anton Renborg, Cédric Delsaux and Yusuf Sevinçli, Sandra Rocha is Gilles Coulon French photographer of the collective Tendance Floue, who surveyed the spa town and we discover people (trainees and foreign students) who learn French in Vichy in a structure the French CAVILAM-Alliance.