PHOTOGRAPHY

BURNING CORSO - Thomas Mailaender

with Thomas Mailaender

In the spring of 2024, Thomas Mailaender and the students of the ECAL Bachelor in Photography entered the ruins of the club with the intention of making it resonate once again. Between archaeology, documentary research, and imaginative speculations, the group of adventurers crafted a surprising exhibition path blending mold and glitter, ashes and glamour. For one night, the Corso was filled with explosive sounds and images in a fiery tribute to the nights of Renens.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Pratique photographique

with Maxime Guyon

"Extraordinary Daily Commodities": Everyday Objects What if the objects around us were not mere tools, but autonomous entities with their own essence? Inspired by Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), this semester invited students to explore objects from a fresh perspective. Freed from the shadow of our consciousness, they take a place equal to that of humans, animals, and plants. Guided by Maxime Guyon, second-year photography students were encouraged to rediscover what "banal" truly means and dive into a reflection on the place and sensitivity of objects in the contemporary world.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Blue jeans

with Philippe Jarrigeon, Philippe Jarrigeon

This year, a unique workshop invited students to explore the relationship between an object and its image. By delving into the material properties, history, symbolism, and multiple representations of an iconic object, they sought to understand the aura that defines it. The subject of this first edition? The blue jean. From a simple utilitarian garment to a global symbol of style, the blue jean transcends generations and cultures. Throughout the semester, students were tasked with creating a photographic project or video that both questions and celebrates this emblematic object.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Picture Consequences

with Tamara Janes

The students task is to create their own story, storyline, narrative or sequences based on the existing given images. Using their personal interests, imagination and ideas they link the images together. They can continue the plot of the images, do in-depth research, write fictional stories or tell stories based on personal experiences. The students had the freedom to photograph, generate or film.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Workshop with Lorenzo Vitturi

with Lorenzo Vitturi

The aim of this workshop is to engage students in a multidisciplinary process that combines photography with sculpture and scenography. To emphasize the importance of the creative process, students are encouraged to use primarily collected and recycled materials, which will need to be transformed and integrated into their visual narrative. The work presented at the end of the workshop will reflect this approach, combining visual results with sculptures and ephemeral installations.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Fine Art Photography

with Laurence Bonvin

Liquid Times Produce a project using photography and video on the theme of fluidity, liquid form and water.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Pop Ups and Masks

with Taiyo Onorato

This workshop focused on staged photography, particularly emphasizing staged portraits. The concentration was on the two essential elements of the portrait: working with the object and manipulating its background. Staged portraits set themselves apart from mere snapshots by actively creating an image, steering clear of reality. Tools like light, background, and pose were employed to craft a deliberate narrative. Individuals were staged, altered in specific ways, adorned with outfits and masks. The workshop delved into the interest in masks as tools for transformation and representation. Throughout the workshop, masks were produced using available means, and they became the central objects of staging. Students photographed and filmed them, capturing the essence of transformation. The second element of the workshop, which focused on the background, pop-up techniques were experimented with. The backdrop, a dynamic part of the narrative, was manipulated using cleverly designed sets and unexpected spatial techniques. The focus was not just on capturing moments but on crafting them, bringing forth stories that transcended the boundaries of reality. The workshop provided a platform for unleashing creativity and experimentation.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Sara De Brito Faustino – Toute petite et vilaine

by Sara De Brito Faustino

“This project presents the home as a place where uncanniness and vernacular commonness exist side by side. Being an intimate space, a home should be a restful and secure place. However, mine has been the scene of some painful events. Today, I see this house as threatening. Uncomfortable and dysfunctional, it bears the scars of the past. In my photographs, I revisit those memories and reclaim my body. My tiny dioramas express my young self’s ideals opposed to the wounds I currently bear. Constructing, deconstructing, objects become bodies, whereas my being feels deformed and petrified. Toute petite et vilaine (“Tiny and Ugly”) creates an antagonistic tension between appealing visuals and disturbing details.“

PHOTOGRAPHY

BLI × ECAL

with Matthieu Gafsou

The collaboration between the ECAL and the BLI touches on contemporary issues that are of particular concern to students at the school: our relationship with minorities and the appropriate way of representing them. For a long time, a paternalistic anthropological attitude was tolerated and even encouraged in the world of photography. Attitudes have changed, and the young artists at the ECAL have developed a relationship of equals with the various communities they have encountered. Creating the images required a language that enabled the students to position themselves in relation to others and to establish protocols in line with their own values and those of the people on the other side of the lens. The images give us a complex, multifaceted panorama of our city's cultural diversity, and show us that encounters and mixes are possible and fruitful. Matthieu Gafsou, photographer and teacher.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Photographic Editions

with RVB Books/Matthieu Charon & Rémi Faucheux

Using pre-produced images, the students created one or more book models. How do you transform a series of photographs into a book? The Photographic Editions course introduces students to the selection of images, their order, format, graphics, ink, paper and binding. It addresses the specificities of the book as a medium and as a market.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Révélation Photographique

with Laurence Bonvin

During the first semester of the third year, this course enables students to take up a project they have already started, which could be continued in the second semester for the diploma. Students are encouraged to take risks in form, technique, production or subject matter.

PHOTOGRAPHY

PRATIQUE PHOTOGRAPHIQUE

with Nicolas Poillot

By conceptualizing and producing the visual content for a magazine, themed - RESISTANCE - the students approached the notion of applied photography in a practical, creative and professional way in close collaboration with an Art Director.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Création photographique

with Natacha Lesueur

Over the course of a semester, the students develop a project that examines the challenges of auteur photography and develops their personal expression. The project may be continued as a diploma project in the second semester.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

PHOTOGRAPHY

Service Design - 2023

with Angelo Benedetto, Vincent Jacquier, Pauline Saglio

During the service design course, the 3rd year of the Graphic Design, Photography and Media & Interaction Design bachelor's degree programs realized multi-media projects. A collaboration of the Visual Communication department with the theme of SDGs (*Sustainable Development Goals). The theme named "For a good cause, make the SDGS a reality" aims to develop a cause close to the heart of the different student groups. Each project is composed of at least two different supports, one primary and one secondary. The projects could therefore take any form the students deemed relevant, be it a website, editions and posters, a video sequence, or even virtual reality.

PHOTOGRAPHY

ECAL × JEAN PAUL GAULTIER: Under Your Smell

with Milo Keller, Florence Tétier, Nicolas Coulomb, Calypso Mahieu

The exhibition Under Your Smell offers a hypnotic and immersive experience in Jean Paul Gaultier's headquarters by imagining new definitions of beauty and body expression. Under the direction of Florence Tétier and Nicolas Coulomb, 3rd year Bachelor Photography students brought to life the brand's iconic perfumes through an immersive photographic experience. In the first season, with the complicity of Claude Emmanuelle Gajan Maull, the young photographers have fluidified the iconic bottles with their gendered silhouettes — Le Mâle, Le Classique, Le Beau and La Belle — in a fresh LGBTQIA+ perspective. With this upcoming season, the project evolves around the Scandal fragrance, with the creation of still lives in which the liquid, dry and organic contrasting textures evoke the essence of the perfume, its bottle design and its complexities. Through staging, the perfumes become the backdrop for stories of transgression and fantastical projections. In addition to monumental fabric prints, giant image-cushions welcome the public to lay down and celebrate gender fluidity and the ever changing definitions of beauty and self expression.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Staged photography

with Milo Keller

PHOTOGRAPHY

Photographie et arts plastiques

with Natacha Lesueur

Reference to the masters of the past (even if irreverent) is a recurrent com- posant of modern and contemporary artistic approaches. (Postmodernism; Situationism, Appropriationism) Quotation, homage, parody, remake, pastiche, remix, détournement, recycling, mashup, appropriation, re-enactment, simulationism, found footage, sample, palimpsest - appropriations are numerous and touch all fields.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Earth is Already Crying

with Anouk Kruithof

"Earth is already crying" workshop d'une semaine avec l'artiste Anouk Kruithof.

Mapping Workshop - Nature morte

with Florian Pittet, Clément Lambelet, Eric Morzier

The first year students in Graphic Design and Media & Interaction Design and Photography worked on mapping projects. The structures, which the different groups created with blocks of polystyrene, allowed them to experiment and create video, 2D and 3D content while playing with notions of space, depth and rhythm.

EXHIBITIONS

ECAL×JEAN PAUL GAULTIER: Under Your Smell,
10–12.11.2022,
Paris

From November 10 to 12 2022, Jean Paul Gaultier opens the doors of its Paris headquarters to the general public. During Paris Photo, the House is partnering with ECAL to present the photography exhibition Under Your Smell. Students from Bachelor Photography will show their interpretation of Gaultier's perfumes.

PARTNERSHIP

ECAL×JEAN PAUL GAULTIER: Under Your Smell

The exhibition Under Your Smell offers a hypnotic and immersive experience in Jean Paul Gaultier's headquarters by imagining new definitions of beauty and body expression. Under the direction of Florence Tétier and Nicolas Coulomb, 3rd year Bachelor Photography students brought to life the brand's iconic perfumes through an immersive photographic experience.