PURSUIT / RICHARD PAK / PICTURETANK
A project created over a six years period, Pursuit is the disenchanted chronicle of an ideated America. Being a keen admirer of American literature, cinema and painting, I created my own fancied-America, a not-so-imaginary place filled with fictional heroes. The purpose of this work is to juxtapose a mental construction to the reality of the American everyday life and to picture the “American experience” as a metaphor for a bigger experience. In my photographs I mean to suggest rather than describe, translate life’s small dramas into something timeless and universal. The title Pursuit echoes the United States Declaration of Independence stating every American’s rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. This work is a visual journal of a chimerical quest: happiness, granted as a constitutional right.

LES FRANCAIS A TABLE / STEPHANIE LACOMBE / PICTURETANK
Stéphanie Lacombe has just won the Niépce Award for her series La Table de l'ordinaire. For 3 years she was invited to eat with french people, in cities, suburbs and the countryside. Dietary habits, interior decoration, social, ethnic and cultural diversity, these photographs are windows into the private lives of the french people.

GAMEBIRDS / ERIC GARAULT / PICTURETANK
One day my nephew Ramiro asked me to take a photo of him with his little cockerel. He posed, as proud as punch, with the animal held in his outstretched arms. I looked at the cockerel who seemed to be wondering what was going on, he was beautiful and proud …. snap ! I realised straight away that the relationship between man and animal was going to interest me. I’m usually asked to photograph people, but animals are living beings that we communicate with in a completely different way. Having produced a first series called ‘Bestiary’ which was an encounter with farm animals, I chose to photograph galliform birds and other feathered friends in this second series. Our relationship with fowl is unusual. It isn’t easy to get near them because there is a mutual form of mistrust that comes out in their breathing, squawking, shrieking and wing flapping, or sudden jerky movements. In my work I try and portray this mistrust, and its defiant nature by getting close to the animal. Light and colour help portray texture. Feathers, calls, crests and legs are all things that I emphasize in an attempt to show this strange and intense relationship. In the animals’ expressions you can see a varying questioning, threatening or look of fear. I like to imagine that there is some sort of common intrigue and that the outcome will only be revealed at the end ! With his look and attitude, each animal brings the spectator into an area of shared feeling. The parade of birds makes me think of the pomp and escapades of our society. I’m seeking to show the important link between photographer and model, even though the model may not be human. I take photos of the animals in their natural habitat, and try to show their individual personality like a wandering portrait painter would have. This series, which wouldn’t look out of place in a women’s fashion magazine, is nevertheless a real study of animality.

MACHINES / LUCIE&SIMON / PICTURETANK
The series 'Machines' shows the strained rapport that exists between Man the Consumer - here intentionally absent - and the means of production that satisfy him. Inside factories that resemble purified cubes - placed in fields and made of ephemeral materials - foods are hygienically and vigorously manipulated, until they lose their identity and their original taste. Piled up, broken down, stretched, jagged, ground up, they become boxes, series, dough, or even waste, thrown up by a chaos of pipes and robotic mechanisms, overseen here and there by Man the worker. Man drowned, lost: merely a quasi-invisible link at the heart of an ocean of machines. Is this manipulation of the foods or manipulation of Man the Consumer? Forced by his needs, Man can't avoid these manipulations, as witnessed by the check-out queues of a giant supermarket. With a starkly frontal gaze, the photographs reveal the animated rigidity and controlled violence of the industrial universe. In one composition, bold metallic verticals and horizontals contrast with the rounded shapes of foods before their transformation. Apparent abstraction, which creates the photo-graphic work, behind which extreme realism disappears. The viewer, confused, split, must draw on his imagination, his feelings or his memories of the real world, to give meaning - his own meaning - to the photograph. By alternating wide shots and close-ups, he is brought into the very rhythm of the factory and the machines. The lens, replacing the spectator’s point of view, no longer reveals a state of reality, but rather that of a cadence, of continuous and unstoppable accumulation.

NIGHT JOYRIDE / BRUCE TAJ / PICTURETANK
Bruce Taj sees nightlife as an 'encounter with the Other'. A look, a discussion, a memorable face... To picture feelings, he tries to catch 'moments of life' using long time exposure. Picturing is no more long a 'decisive moment', clear and clean, but a vibrating space, alive. The viewer is free to chose and make sense. 'Night Joyride' is based on a sequence of 'shots' which search with one another their own narrative construction.

KATRINA, OR THE END OF THE WORLD / CEDRIC FAIMALI / ARGOS / PICTURETANK
Four years after Hurricane Katrina, and despite parts of the city being rebuilt, nature has still permanently taken over some houses abandoned by their owners.

EVERYDAY / VALENTINE VERMEIL / TEMPS MACHINE / PICTURETAN