by Stefania Quintajè
For once it was within arm’s reach, and writing about it was a small luxury.
Federico Serrani’s Frames column is usually entrusted to gifted contributors, authors who have been with us for years now. Today, though, this little take-over was almost inevitable: they would have rightly scolded me had I let slip the chance to roll up my sleeves and write about something happening literally outside my own front door. So bear with me. Forgive the departure from routine: this time it falls to me to tell the story.
I’ve lived in Vevey for many years, and I’ll admit that writing about this town has a flavour all its own: for once, the object of desire isn’t on the other side of the world, but a few steps from my front door — the same home from which, between one coffee and my full time job as Legal Counsel, I run Federico Serrani. Vevey lies along the shores of Lake Geneva, between Lausanne and Montreux, resting against the hills of the Lavaux; and every two years it turns from a quiet provincial town into one of Europe’s photography capitals. Being able to write about something born right here, rather than chasing it across airports and time zones, was a genuinely restorative experience.
That Vevey and photography go hand in hand is a long story, and we rather stumbled into the middle of it by chance. Right in the centre, on the Grande Place, the Musée suisse de l’appareil photographique traces centuries of cameras and ways of seeing; the town’s photography schools have trained authors for generations; and the foundation that runs the biennial also manages one of Europe’s oldest photography grants. Calling it a “city of images” is almost an understatement.
So from 5 to 27 September, Images Vevey returns for its tenth edition — a round-numbered birthday, celebrated under the theme We are family!, family in all its forms. The formula remains the one that made it famous: photography leaves the museums and spills out across the city, over façades, squares, gardens and lakeshores. Some fifty projects, all free, tailored to the place that hosts them, so that each image converses with its context rather than merely decorating it.
You need only step out of the station to run into the first encounter. In the gardens out front, the photographs of Siân Davey are on fine display, drawn from her project The Garden. The story behind these images is a tender one: together with her son Luke, Davey transformed her own garden — abandoned for years — into a lush carpet of wildflowers, and into that little Eden she invited anyone who passed by on the far side of the wall — neighbours, strangers, lovers, the lonely, wounded souls — to sit for a portrait. Among the hundreds of faces is that of Martin Parr, the great British photographer who passed away last December, and to whom Vevey has dedicated a monumental print spanning an entire building. A tribute made all the more moving by chance, when you consider that Davey’s work is held by the very foundation that bears Parr’s name.
Vevey’s lakefront is among the loveliest and liveliest in the region, and strolling along it you reach the Alimentarium, the food museum founded by Nestlé — the multinational born right here, when in 1867 the pharmacist Henri Nestlé perfected his “milk flour” for infants, saving the life of a premature baby and changing the fortunes of the company and the town forever. In front of the museum, where the famous giant fork rises out of the lake, sits the exquisitely “alimentary” work of Tokuko Ushioda: for her series Ice Box, the Japanese photographer peered inside the refrigerators of her own home, of relatives and friends, portraying them open and closed like small, involuntary portraits of their owners. Some would shy away, she recounts, as though showing their fridge meant baring their stomach in public.
Vevey is also the city of the Fête des Vignerons, the colossal festival that roughly every twenty years celebrates this land’s foremost product: the wine that grows on the gentle terraced hills of the Lavaux, sloping down to the lake and long since a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The brotherhood that organises it has its own museum, and it is there that two works by Rineke Dijkstra find their home. The first, Marianna (The Fairy Doll), follows a little girl as she prepares her audition for the prestigious Vaganova Academy in Saint Petersburg: a small fairy suspended between flawless grace and the ceaseless voice of the off-camera teacher. The second, Almerisa, is a novel told in images spanning fourteen years: a Bosnian girl who found refuge in Leiden, whom Dijkstra photographed every two years from childhood to adulthood. The loveliest part is that it was Almerisa who chose her — as a child, watching the photographer at work with other little girls, she burst into tears because she wanted to be in the picture too. From those tears grew a bond between model and artist that lasted a lifetime, all the way to the closing portrait, with Almerisa now grown and her first child in her arms.
At the skatepark overlooking the lake, meanwhile, Luisa Dörr’s series Imilla comes to life. Imilla means “girl” in the Aymara and Quechua languages, and its protagonists are a group of Bolivian skaters who glide along wearing the pollera, the traditional skirt of Indigenous women, over a pair of sneakers: a claim to identity and, at the same time, a chosen family, held together by sisterhood even more than by blood. A little curiosity about the artist: the Brazilian Luisa Dörr is renowned for making many of her portraits with a simple iPhone.
Inside the Château de l’Aile, on the central square, we are welcomed at last by the astonishing collages of Vik Muniz. The Brazilian artist collects anonymous family albums — bought quite literally by the kilo at flea markets — then cuts them up and reassembles them into profound new images, where thousands of other people’s memories come together to form a single face, a single recollection. Anyone familiar with Muniz knows he has already built portraits out of chocolate, sugar, diamonds and even rubbish: from the latter came Waste Land, the Oscar-nominated documentary about the waste pickers of Rio.
And it is precisely family, in all its forms, that is the thread holding this edition together: from the albums of strangers that Muniz turns into new memory, to the communities we choose as kin, all the way to the very reasons we take photographs. Sunil Gupta reminds us of this at the Salle del Castillo with Lovers, Revisited, a return to a theme very dear to him. In the 1980s, with the series Lovers: Ten Years On begun in 1984, Gupta portrayed gay couples in their London homes, at a time when those images were met with unease and then set aside; today he returns to the same ground alongside his husband Charan Singh, photographing queer couples and partners from all over the world — and even re-photographing one of the original sitters. From the denied rights of forty years ago to the family that today exists and lays claim to its own space, out in broad daylight.
Whatever your destination, then, Vevey offers everything a photography lover could wish for: calm, curiosity, beauty, and that rare kind of peace that invites you to linger. A thousand ways to spend your time contemplating your favourite authors and discovering new ones, with the lake as a backdrop. From 5 to 27 September, more than forty artists stand ready to make you dream. If you’re ever passing through, do let me know: I make an excellent coffee (with Moka!).
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