PRIX PHOTO & SCIENCES 2023

Prix photographie & sciences

WHY A PHOTOGRAPHY & SCIENCES PRIZE?

Photography and sciences, a dialogue to engage! 

We are convinced that sciences and arts have a vocation to meet in an intimate and creative dialogue that gives us something to see, to think about and to engage with. For Pythagoras, science and mathematisation are not an end in themselves, but a way of revealing a mystery and an emotion.  It is this same emotion that photography arouses, which has become a major art form that, more than ever, questions the world around us, brings men and women together, and links our societies. Bringing « Photography & Science » together is to participate in this necessary dialogue between several actors of the same society, willing to question together the place of the Human being in his environment and his role within contemporary connected, constantly changing and interdependent societies.

« The few discussions I’ve had with artists have helped me to get a perspective on what I do. We scientists are very attached to reality. We are explorers, not really dreamers. With them, I found this part of the dream. These are the words of Sylvestre Maurice, astrophysicist, astronomer and planetologist, specialist in the exploration of the solar system and sponsor of the 2019 edition of the Résidence 1+2. It shows the touching curiosity of an internationally renowned scientist for modes of artistic expression with an unsuspected evocative force.

It is true that, at first glance, photography and science are quite different : they have neither the same object, nor the same methods and purposes. If the former summons the sensitive and the imaginary, the latter is based on reason and reality. And yet, on closer inspection, they both question the world by making the invisible visible, pushing back the frontiers of knowledge, giving us a different way of seeing. If photography tells the story of the world’s twists and turns, the sciences help us to understand them better. Since its creation at the end of 2015, the Résidence 1+2 in Toulouse has had the ambition to bring together people who, at first sight, had no chance to talk to each other.

This third « Photography & Sciences » prize, 2023 edition, aims to be fully in line with this shared dynamic around a professional photographer of the french scene (french creators or artists working and/or living in France, whatever their nationality) : to create, in a collaborative and participative spirit, the right conditions for the creation of sensitive content, with photographer and scientists sharing thoughts and resources, composing new knowledges in a sort of factory of possibilities. 

At a time when the boundaries between all disciplines are crumbling, bringing artists and scientists together in the same project is an invitation to join forces, to stimulate new cross-disciplinary approaches, to renew creative forms in order to help us, together, to better understand and act in the face of the challenges of the contemporary world.

Philippe GUIONIE

General Delegate of the Photography and Sciences Prize

PRESENTATION OF THE PRIZE

La RÉSIDENCE 1+2, the FRENCH MINISTRY OF CULTURE, ADAGP, CNRS, STIMULTANIA (associated place) and PICTO FOUNDATION are committed to supporting contemporary photography by creating the Prix Photographie & Sciences, with media partners Fisheye and Sciences et Avenir – La Recherche. This annual prize is open to all professional photographers on the French scene (French creators or artists working and/or living in France, whatever their nationality) developing an auteur photography. An endowment of 7,000 euros will support the winning photographer in finalizing a photographic series in progress, combining photography and science, in France and abroad. Remuneration for the winning photographer will be included in the prize money. The winner will also benefit from dedicated communication with media partners. The presentation of the complete series will be the subject of a round table with screening in June 2024 at ADAGP (Paris) and an exhibition at STIMULTANIA, associated venue (Strasbourg) in 2025.

SCHEDULE
  • Call for entries: Thursday, July 6, 2023 at 11am at the Fisheye Gallery at the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles.
  • Application deadline: September 15, 2023 at 7pm.
  • Jury meeting: October 3, 2023 at ADAGP (Paris).
  • Announcement of winner: October 14, 2023.
  • Restitutions: round table with projection at ADAGP (Paris) in 2024 and an exhibition at STIMULTANIA (Strasbourg) in 2025.

Diffusion presse :
Catherine PHILIPPOT et Prune PHILIPPOT

Relations Media

248 boulevard Raspail – 75014 Paris

cathphilippot@relations-media.com

prunephilippot@relations-media.com

01 40 47 63 42

LAUREATE 2022

Manon Lanjouère – Particles, the human tale of dying water

The Prix Photographie & Sciences will enable Manon Lanjouère to continue her cycle of artistic and plastic research, offering us a poetic look at the pollution that intrinsically alters our oceans.

The presentation of the series will be the subject of a round-table discussion and screening at ADAGP (Paris) on September 12, 2023 at 6:30 pm, followed by an exhibition at Stimultania Pôle de photographie in Strasbourg, France (combined exhibition by Richard Pak, winner #2021, and Manon Lanjouère, winner #2022, from April 28 to September 17, 2023).

LAUREATE 2023

Anaïs Tondeur – Fleurs de feux, le témoignage des cendres.

Intertwining photography and ecology, archaeo-botany and philosophy, this series of photographic prints is developed in companionship with plants growing in the extreme soils of the Anthropocene.

« The first gesture of this project took shape with philosopher Michael Marder and the irradiated flora of the Exclusion Zone in Chernobyl. Entitled Tchernobyl Herbarium, this herbarium is thickened each year with a new textual and rayographic fragment, created by the direct imprint of radioactive plant specimens on photosensitive sheets. For the second part of this series, we’ll be exploring the ruderal plants that thrive in the ashes of Europe’s largest open-air landfill site, Terre des Feux, in the Naples region.

In an experimental and ecological photographic protocol, I will collect the traces of these plants’ bodies without extracting them from the soil. This encounter through images will thus take place without any intervention other than bringing the elements together.

Anaïs Tondeur

In collaboration with Michael Marder.

LAUREATE 2021

Richard Pak – L’île naufragée (Les îles du désir – Chapitre III)

Richard Pak suffers from an advanced form of “Islomania” (a term coined by Lawrence Durell) and has been carrying out artistic research on insularity for several years.

Nauru, in Oceania, has gone from the richest country to one of the poorest in the world in less than twenty years. Its story could be a literary fiction in which delusions of grandeur and greed have transformed an island paradise into an ecological, economic and social disaster. On the atoll, columns of coral – remnants of a century of phosphate mining – stand as far as the eye can see. In Shipwrecked Island, Richard Pak subjects his negatives to a chemical treatment based on phosphoric acid (H3PO4) which alters the emulsion, sparing only the red range. The aesthetic rendering takes us towards (science) fiction or mythological fable. The characters, princes and princesses, weightlifting presidents and beauty queens are carried away in a ballet of sweepers struggling to chase the phosphate dust from the surface of the island.

EN