Damia: Concert in Black Velvet 1989
Documentary on the singer Damia.
Documentary on the singer Damia.
The Contacts collection is an invitation to discover the artistic approach of the greatest contemporary photographers from an original angle. Through a series of images (contact sheets, proofs, prints and slides), with a commentary by the photographer, the viewer enters the secret world of their creation and is guided into the heart of the photographic creative process.
Joris Lachaise takes us to Thiaroye, in a suburb near Dakar, to enter the psychiatric hospital accompanied by writer and filmmaker Khady Sylla who has been admitted there several times. She meets up with her doctor, familiar patients and others with whom she discusses the delicate issue of therapeutic methods and their link with colonialism. The project is clearly ambitious, it combines the description of a place with portraits of beings marked by suffering, it blends the spectacle of different types of care (religious, traditional, modern) with considerations concerning the multiplicity of such care since we are present during discussions between marabouts and modern doctors about the possible coexistence of their practices. What remains of madness? Anything but meagre remnants: chaos, an uproar of silence and diatribes, a disturbing world where every- thing remains to be deciphered.
Sophie Calle often defines herself as a "narrative" artist. Her photographs are items of evidence through which she tells stories that are both ordinary and disturbing, using her own life and experiences as the raw material for reconstructions that hover somewhere between truth and fiction. The Contacts collection is an invitation to discover the artistic approach of the greatest contemporary photographers from an original angle. Through a series of images (contact sheets, proofs, prints and slides), with a commentary by the photographer, the viewer enters the secret world of their creation and is guided into the heart of the photographic creative process.