Photographic Essays

Photographic Essays

In the second year, the course Photographic Essays course enables students to exercise a documentary photographic practice –one based on a relationship with reality, with something anchored in the here and now.

This year, students worked on a theme related to ecology in the broadest sense: a very specific, concrete starting point (a permaculture garden, Extinction Rebellion activists, documentation of polluted sites, encounters with people working with more-than-human animals), a broader, multiple or personal approach.

Studio project (2023) with Matthieu Gafsou

Assistants
Angèle Marignac-Serra
Students
2 BAPH, Léa Bevilacqua, Johanna Bommer, Gilian Cardaci, Hector Codazzi, Carla Corminboeuf, Matilde Croxatto, Jennica Folkesson, Lorane Hochstätter, Sarah Marachly, Barnabé Masson, Yves Möhrle, Léo Paschoud, Cyriane Rawyler, Seraphine Sallin-Mason, Noé Vercaemst, Antoine Woeffray
Know-how
Documentary
Gilian Cardaci - ECAL
Gilian Cardaci - ECAL/Gilian Cardaci
Gilian Cardaci - ECAL
Gilian Cardaci - ECAL
Gilian Cardaci - ECAL
Gilian Cardaci - ECAL

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Projects related to Documentary

Fine Art Photography

BA PHOTOGRAPHY

Fine Art Photography

with Natacha Lesueur

VULGAR Based on projects developed around a common theme, students create a personal and in-depth body of work exploring the notion of deception. They build a project that plays with the boundaries of photographic truth, using the medium as an artifice of lies.

ECAL × SDOL, Horizon Ouest, Regards sur la métamorphose urbaine

BA PHOTOGRAPHY

ECAL × SDOL, Horizon Ouest, Regards sur la métamorphose urbaine

with Matthieu Gafsou

New transport infrastructure is emerging, while former industrial wastelands are giving way to modern buildings and redesigned outdoor spaces. Gradually, residents are moving into these new neighborhoods and adopting new habits.  To capture the first moments of life in these spaces, the association "Ouest lausannois: Prix Wakker 2011" has invited second-year students from the ECAL Bachelor of Photography program to observe them throughout 2024.   This project highlights 18 ongoing construction sites or recently completed neighborhoods. Through their perspectives, the students offer original approaches to discovering, understanding, and appropriating these new spaces.  Photography maintains a unique relationship with the world around us, as it often depends on it. Far from merely documenting reality in a strict sense, it has the power to transfigure and reveal the invisible or the unspeakable. This is the approach adopted by the ECAL photography students at the request of the "Ouest lausannois: Prix Wakker 2011" association, as they explored various territories in western Lausanne.   As part of this commission, each student was randomly assigned a specific location—be it a new neighborhood, a construction site, or a distinctive building—on which they worked over an academic year. Faced with spaces that were sometimes unphotogenic or even resistant to imagery, the challenge was to look beyond appearances, to resonate with these places in order to grasp their unique dynamics.   The photographs question our perception of these recent landscapes and bear witness to the human activity unfolding within them. What do they reveal about our ways of living and moving? Who are the people inhabiting these spaces? What new landscapes emerge from these rapid transformations?  Through approaches that are sometimes sensitive and intimate, sometimes detached and analytical, or even driven by a formal fascination with the objects captured, the works presented reveal the density and diversity of everyday life. They bring forth a poetic vision of the city, inviting us to consider these territories not merely as functional backdrops but as fully-fledged spaces, rich with history, form, and identity—fluid and multifaceted, just like those who inhabit them.

Video

BA PHOTOGRAPHY

Video

with Olivia Schenker

Simulations By making a very short film, students learn fundamental notions in the narrative, visual and conceptual development of video production. The project provides essential technical skills in shooting, lighting, camera movement, sound recording, editing and post-production.

Fine Art Photography

BA PHOTOGRAPHY

Fine Art Photography

with Natacha Lesueur

Documenteur – The Power of the Fake Based on projects developed around a common theme, students create a personal and in-depth body of work exploring the notion of deception. They build a project that plays with the boundaries of photographic truth, using the medium as an artifice of lies.

Photographic Essays

BA PHOTOGRAPHY

Photographic Essays

with Matthieu Gafsou

This year's “Documentary Practices” course is devoted to a territory that is very close to us and, in a way for most of us, very far away: the countryside. For a city-dweller, the countryside is an out-of-town territory where you can go for a walk, where there are farmers, fields and forests. Recent votes in Switzerland testify to a considerable widening of the gap between town and country: the far right would be the place of rurality, while the left would be urban. This territory is not only topologically different from the city, but also seems to be inhabited by people whose lifestyles and thinking are at odds with the city. The reality, however, is obviously more complex and resists such simplification.

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