After a long silence finally some news: Art Academy school commenced again (we are now in our 2nd year) and this year a weekend was planned in Paris to visit “Mois de la Photo”, featuring 100 photography exhibitions… This event goes through every 2 years in Paris. In total 10 students (from year 1 upto 7) joined in together with our teacher Frank Michta. Below you can find the flyer for the event (organised for 1 month from 27.10.10 until 30.11.10 – in case you missed it you will have to wait another 2 years, sorry!):

Flyer from “Mois de la Photo 2010”

 We left on Saturday morning 06:30am (was a bit hurting on Saturday) and drove together with a minivan to Paris – where we arrived only 1 (immense) traffic jam and 4.5 hrs later. Quickly checked into hotel and went off straigth away to visit our first exhibition of the day: “La France de Raymond Depardon” – immense prints from a 8×10 camera – what i loved here whas the immense detail in the prints, and the color combinations – nice job done documenting France! After a taking a quick grab-shot from the surrounding “Bibliotheque Nationale de France”

Patterns of bibliotheque Nationale de France

 and taking a quick (but delicious!) sandwich bite we went onwards to the “Espace Photographique de l’Hotel de Sauroy” where photographs from Jacques Borgetto, Francoise Nunez, Bernard Plossu and Sophie Zenon were shown. Entrance to the exhibition can be seen below:

Entrance to the “Espace photographique de l’Hotel de Sauroy”

 Beautiful black and white photographs! After this – time for a drink (ah ja – we are Belgians after all) in a cosy Paris bar:

Wall painting in a Paris bar

 As can be seen Paris is not too far from Belgium (for the un-educated: Grimbergen is a Flemish abbey beer). After this intermezzo we went to the exhibition from Sally Mann in the Galerie Karsten Greve – a famous American photographer known for her large format, black and white photographs of her kids (posing as if they were adults) and for her landscapes suggesting decay and death. While I really liked all her photographs, i was drawn to the “imperfect” ones, the toned and texturized ones… After this one we had a quick visit to Galerie Pierre Alain Challier (“Peinture ou Photographie?”) followed by the Cultural Institute of Mexico showcasing pictures from Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Agustin Jimenez and Luis Marquez. Again mostly black and white photographs, liked in particular the frame with the fisherman shown below:

Fisherman from Luiz Marquez

Finally we went to Galerie David Guiraud showcasing works from Elliott Erwitt and that was it, the day had flown by! All the galeries were closed, finally we found some time for a nice dinner in a Japanese restaurant, not without first entering a galerie showcasing some “Light” art – especially the below optical effect was a nice sight (the colors are actually painted on the wall/staircase!):

Optical effect on staircase

 After this back to the hotel for some well-deserved night rest (or so we thought – a room was quickly changed in an after-bar were we could sip on some wine (ah ja we are in France after all!) and talk some more about the things we saw…
This was a long post, but seen the long silence… Anyways part 2 of the visit (exhibitions visited on Sunday 21st November) will be the subject of the next posting!