Alain Willaume

Alain Willaume's project pays homage to Anne Testut's pioneering photographic study entitled Europe à la Table, conducted between 1991 and 1994, in which she addressed the subject of Europe, the family and food. This photo collection can now be seen in print in two volumes published by Filigrane and Les Éditions de l’Imprimeur in 1995. Although Anne Testut has long abandoned photography work, Willaume has invited her to collaborate in the SETSE project.

The Europe à la Table series was completed fifteen years ago and in the meantime, globalization and new technologies have transformed everyday life. Yet the “ceremony of the family meal” has withstood the test of time and continues to provide the ideal pretext to study the intimacy and ambiguity of family life, of people and their objects. Through his project, Alain Willaume puts forward a new interpretation of this theme.

He photographed the families during and immediately after their meal, introducing his presence into one of the most private social situations without being invasive. Indeed, once the introductions were over, “those who had partaken of the meal” very quickly forgot about the stranger in their midst. Willaume concentrated on daily domestic rituals and, as always happens in his images, he paid particular attention to the look on the faces of the subjects he was portraying. At the end of the meal, the photographer asked all the members of the family to “give themselves” to the camera lens and seek inner concentration, distancing themselves from the present. Willaume's images convey this withdrawal and force the viewer to meet the subjects portrayed head on. The looks on their faces, with their intensity and detachment from the context, surprise and disquiet the viewer. Using the closeness between the themes of “family” and “food”, the photographer takes us to the crossroads between two worlds: inside a private and intimate ritual and towards the boundaries of an inner landscape.

At the end of every photographic session, Willaume asked each member of the family two questions – formulated with Anne Testut's collaboration – on their own personal experience of food and future idea of it. Each family was also asked to provide a selection of images from their own photo archives on the subject of meals. Willaume then gave their archives a second reading, providing a different interpretive framework for their images. He went through the same selection process with the historical archives stored at the Photo Library of Reggio Emilia's Panizzi Library.
 

Alain Willaume was born in 1956 in Strasburg. He lives and works in Paris.
Alain Willaume develops an unusual work in tune with the world which he crosses and observes for many years. Under the influence of long journeys and away from the main streams, he draws up a personal cartography made of enigmatic images, which all tell of the violence and the vulnerability of the world and the human beings who live in it.
Freelance photographer (represented bu VU Gallery), independent curator, editor and lecturer at École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasburg. He recently initiated and co-curated the INDIA programme of exhibitions at Rencontres d’Arles 2007 and is the editor of India Now: New Visions in Photography, published by Thames & Hudson/Textuel in 2007. Artistic Director of IndiaPhotoNow 2008, a Year of Photography in India. His last monograph Bords du gouffre was published by Textuel, Paris and exhibited in Rencontres d’Arles 2003. He won the Prix Kodak de la Critique Photographique.
 

Info
Galleria Parmeggiani
Corso Cairoli 2 - Reggio Emilia
Tel. 0522 451152, 0522 456249, 0522 456635, 0522 456448
Single ticket for all exhibitions 10€. Concessions 7€

Open Times:
Opening Friday 7th May, 19.00
7th May from 19.00 to 24.00; 8th - 9th May from 10.00 to 23.00
From 10th May to 13rd June: from Tuesdays to Fridays from 20.00 to 23.00; Saturdays, Sundays and festivals from 10.00 to 23.00. Monday closed. Open in the morning for schools.

 

Saturday 8th May, 17.30 – Piazza Casotti
Fabrice Courthial presents Alain Willaume e Simona Ghizzoni
SETSE - Seeing European Culture Through a Stranger’s Eyes