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PHOTOGRAPHY

Clara Stote – My Favorite Place on Earth Was Huntington, Long Island

by Clara Stote

My Favorite Place on Earth Was Huntington, Long Island is a project rooted in personal conflict and questions of identity. From Belgian and American heritage, the artist was born and raised in France. As a child, she idolized her American cousins, but over time diverging values have pulled them apart. Several of her family members align with far-right Christian politics. That estrangement became the central question of this project: had the artist grown up in the United States, would she have become like them? Between nostalgia, fascination, and reality, this project reaches towards something larger. In the current American political landscape, reality and truth have become distorted, and weaponized. My Favorite Place on Earth Was Huntington, Long Island sits inside that unease: What is real? What can you trust when truth has become a commodity?

PHOTOGRAPHY

Binyu Lin – Still Cruising

by Binyu Lin

Still Cruising remains the scenes that have shaped the artist's desire. These desires are built through the accumulation of a particular queer male imagery: a body that is exposed, trained, and performed. Repeatedly consumed, these images gradually slip into a state of exhaustion. Using staged photography, this project attempts to re-enter this imagery. Through the lens, between aiming and focusing, the desired body is propped up, suspended, or revealed in states of fatigue. As the gaze drifts, attention gradually shifts from the object of desire back toward the self. Through this repeated process of reconstruction and return, Still Cruising seeks to negotiate a space between obsession and the self, a space in which to dwell.

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Thomas Martin – To Dream a Night, Gently, Through a Glass, Darkly

by Thomas Martin

To Dream a Night, Gently, Through a Glass, Darkly explores the fear of losing sight, rooted in a personal risk, and utilizes it as a metaphor for a broader loss of clarity, belief, and imagination. Through generative AI images and the appropriation of mass-media AI misinformation imagery, the work takes the form of both a book and a site-specific video installation. The project stages an unstable world where looking no longer guarantees understanding. It considers how neural media, political anxiety and apocalyptic narratives shape what we see, believe and imagine. This project asks whether blindness can become a form of protection, and what it means to keep looking when the future itself appears in collapse, obscured and hallucinatory.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Lóa Fenzy – Remy

by Lóa Fenzy

Remy is a hybrid short film that moves between constructed documentary and durational performance, using casting and rehearsal as both methodology and narrative structure. Starting from the question, “What happens if I hire actors to play my father?”, the film follows eight middle-aged men auditioning for the role of my absent father, before three are invited into increasingly intimate rehearsals and staged encounters. What initially resembles a familiar casting process slowly unfolds into a space where masculinity, authority, tenderness, and care are performed between strangers. Through repetition, direction, improvisation, and emotional negotiation, the film gradually exposes its own construction, blurring the line between sincerity and performance.

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Xiao Fu – The Surrogate

by Xiao Fu

The Surrogate is a mixed media project combining video installation and physical imagery. Inspired by the parallels between the controlled reproductive life of the giant panda and Chinese queer experiences of social pressure, these works explore the complexity of identity construction through synthetic images and tactile surfaces. Using a CGI panda as a digital avatar, The Surrogate weaves a narrative that is both absurd and emotional. Bodily materials attempt to physically deconstruct the image of the panda while introducing queer sensations linked to softness, eroticism, and unease that transcend the purely visual experience. Rather than seeking a stable truth about identity, the surrogate body remains in a state of perpetual rendering while maintaining a critical stance.

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Elisa Hampe – Through My Hands, Broken into Fingers

by Elisa Hampe

Through My Hands, Broken into Fingers is a photographic series addressing the detachment from reality through screens, from a digitally native perspective. The artist constructed painterly images by capturing objects, bodies, and spaces through photogrammetric scans made with a smartphone, and reassembling them into complex scenes using a 3D software. The resulting images depict exhausted figures suspended in states of waiting and immobility. Through the scanning process, surfaces and textures are transformed: blankets lose their softness and become rigid shells, bodies appear hollow and fragile, and familiar interiors collapse into unstable and claustrophobic environments. Alongside the wall-based images, a sculpture in printed aluminium reintroduces the mediated body back into physical space.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Julieta Tarraubella – Archaeology of Birth

by Julieta Tarraubella

The artist was born in 1991 in Tacna, southern Perú, in the Atacama Desert. Twenty kilometres away lies Miculla, a valley of petroglyphs dating from the 5th to the 15th centuries. A week after her birth, her mother baptised the artist there and offered her life to the universe. The starting point of Archaeology of Birth is the photographic archive of Miculla taken by the artist's mother. These images were used to train an AI that reimagines what travellers saw in the desert and carved into stone. Using different representations mediated by technology, the project takes the form of an installation composed of an audiovisual fiction, vibrating petroglyph-rock sculptures, and an embracing panoramic image of the Andes. Giving agency to the elements of the desert, Archaeology of Birth reconstructs a landscape that is at once historical, inherited, and imagined.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Andrey Lopatin – Flies

by Andrey Lopatin

Flies is a short film built around the image of a plane crash. It blends AI-generated domestic environments and hallucinatory landscapes inhabited by puppets with archival footage from NASA's 1984 Controlled Impact Demonstration crash test, following a young dummy boy obsessed with aviation disasters. Its two visual registers work as metaphors for a world saturated with disaster imagery, and a condition in which reality and simulation grow indistinguishable. The puppets appear human and vulnerable, yet they are artificial things manipulated from outside. Moving between pilot, passenger, child, and impossible dream-like viewpoints, the film lets simulation, memory, fantasy, and documentation collapse into one another. The fly drifts across these realities as a fragile, persistent witness.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Zhiyue Liu – Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones

by Zhiyue Liu

Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones originates from a concealed childhood bodily experience and unfolding into an exploration of desire, sexuality, and fantasy shaped by migration. Borrowing from a Chinese metaphor for navigating uncertainty through instinct and touch, the project reflects a state of curiosity, confusion, and searching. Through staged photographs, the artist invites female friends to perform ordinary gestures of daily life: domestic, bodily, and playful actions moving between care, routine, intimacy, and the rituals through which a home is inhabited. Drawing on fantasies and desires repressed within the Chinese cultural context, the images complicated conventional ways of looking at the female body, inhabiting sapphic eroticism, exposure, curiosity, and strangeness.

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Gaia Pierobon – Sara

by Gaia Pierobon

Sara is a photographic project that the artist developed with her cousin. Having grown up together before distance separated them, photography became a way to rebuild their relationship. The work follows a young woman whose world has gradually narrowed to the space of her bedroom, where screens, drawings, songs, and imagined worlds feel safer than the outside world. At its core, the project explores isolation, imagination, disability, and the complexity of navigating adulthood both physically and socially. Approaching photography as a space of care and collaboration, the project became a love letter to Sara, an attempt to show her the beauty, depth, and tenderness the artist sees in her.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Workshop - Rachel de Joode - 2026

with Rachel de Joode, Clément Lambelet

For this workshop, ECAL invited Rachel de Joode, Berlin-based artist whose practice explores the relationship between photography, sculpture, and digital images. During the week, students experimented with transforming photographic images into three-dimensional forms. Starting from simple concepts, they produced or gathered image material intended for printing and treated images as surfaces to cut, fold, layer, and assemble into sculptural objects. Through rapid tests and material experimentation, the workshop encouraged students to move repeatedly between image, surface, object, and documentation. By working with printing, scale, and spatial placement, they explored how photographic images can gain physical presence and occupy space beyond the screen.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Self-Initiated Project - Fall 2025 - MAP2

with Elisa Medde

This module assists the students to develop into a finalized work a project that further expands their interests and research. The module gives the opportunity to take some of the ideas, skills and themes explores in the first semester and make into a brand new work that can take any possible form: a book, an installation, an online project, a performance.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Soft Photography - Fall 2025 - MAP2

with Marco De Mutiis

The course, tutored by Marco De Mutiis, explored how emotions are being exploited and transformed by social media practices and aesthetics (e.g. influencer photography and CGI, operational beauty and weaponized cuteness), as well as through recent image technologies (e.g. generative AI platforms and text-to-image services).

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Materialized Photography - Fall 2025 - MAP2

with Mazaccio & Drowilal

The purpose of this class is to examine the relationships between photography — in a context shaped by the digital — and its various modes of display. Students will have to consider what a photograph may be materially and explore how an image’s meaning is derived from both the mode of its distribution and the material form that it assumes. Although the final outcome has to include photography in a third dimensional way ( installation ), projects may use and combine image-based practices such as digital photography, collage, CGI, projection, printmaking, sculpture, objects, or performance, to encourage an expanded approach to photographic practice. The idea is to challenge the different types of engagement possible with pictures today.

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Self-Initiated Project - Fall 2025 - MAP1

with Milo Keller

The course is a platform for the development of personal projects that arise from the desire and curiosity of each student. The basic concept of the work must be relevant to the field of contemporary photographic images. Each project can take a different form depending on the specificities, contents and inclinations of each participant. From books to multimedia installations, from performance to CGI, group discussions will articulate a plural vision of photography’s applications today.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Workshop - Simone C Niquille - 2025

with Simone Niquille, Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet

For this workshop, ECAL invited Simone C Niquille, Swiss designer and researcher based in Amsterdam whose practice investigates how digital images, computer vision, and 3D technologies shape the way bodies and objects are represented in contemporary visual culture. Through her research platform Technoflesh, Niquille examines the infrastructures behind digital imagery (from stock images and 3D assets to machine vision systems) and the cultural assumptions embedded in them. Her work reveals how datasets, rendering software, and visual standards influence how bodies, materials, and environments are modeled and understood.

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Applied Photography - Automne 2025 - MAP1

with Charles Negre, Milo Keller

The course focuses on developing the ability to respond to a commission within one’s own artistic practice, through an introduction to studio photography and constructed image-making. With an emphasis on still life, students refine their sensitivity to photographing and interpreting objects. Assignments revolve around transforming everyday objects into objects of desire, using the tools of commercial and product photography. Through styling, lighting, and visual storytelling, students explore how to reframe the ordinary as something compelling, working across both traditional and improvised studio setups.

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Contemporary Photography - Fall 2025 - MAP1

with Clothilde Morette

The course explores the history of photography and related media through an approach that dissolves boundaries between academic and popular culture, and between photography and other artistic practices. Drawing on references from science, science fiction, literature, cinema, and the visual arts, students engage with a broad history of images from the early twentieth century to today. Based on key exhibitions of the Independent Group, the course introduces open themes such as technology, motion, and imagined worlds. Through research, appropriation, and the development of a mind-map accompanied by a theoretical text, students are encouraged to build connections across disciplines and reflect on the conceptual and narrative dimensions of their practice.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Workshop - CGI WITH AREA OF WORK – 2025

with Area Of Work

The Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) Workshop is an introduction to 3D creation software that allows you to create images with photographic qualities that are not photographs. This workshop centers on the theme of “Minimal,” inviting students to explore the creative and technical foundations of contemporary CGI image-making. It emphasizes materiality and the expressive impact of reduction. Every form, light, and texture has a specific role, negative space guides the emotional tone, and fine details unify the composition.

PHOTOGRAPHY

ECAL at OFFPRINT Paris 2025

with Bruno Ceschel, Nicolas Polli, Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet

During Paris Photo 2025, ECAL will present a selection of its books at OFFPRINT Paris. ECAL Master Photography is pleased to present a selection of books created by its second-year students. This event offers an opportunity to engage live with the young photographers, exploring the origins of their projects and the stories behind each of these publications.

PHOTOGRAPHY

ECAL x PAPERBOY

with Charles Negre, Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet, Tanguy Morvan

Paperboy ECAL is the result of a close collaboration between Paperboy Magazine and first-year students of the Master Photography program. Under the guidance of photographer Charles Negre , they explored the potential of everyday objects to create mysterious and playful still lives.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Riccardo Androni – Exhaustion

by Riccardo Androni

Exhaustion is a critical and ironic response to the performance-driven society the photographer inhabits — one that demands constant motion, visibility, and productivity. Through absurd and site-specific gestures in public spaces, he confronts machines of efficiency and elevation with deliberate resistance. The photographer climbs down an escalator, blocks a door with his head, bends to stay in frame. These futile acts follow a strict protocol and expose the tragic emptiness behind endless self-performance. With dry humor and physical endurance, Exhaustion seeks to unmask a system that rewards conformity and erases meaning — until all that remains is exhaustion.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Nabarun Gogoi – The Swan

by Nabarun Gogoi

In this short film, the photographer used a CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) avatar to address and question contemporary notions of masculinity and the complex relationship it shares with love. Inspired by the photographer's own apprehensions related to connecting with other men, the short film uncovers the subtle yet forceful indoctrination of masculine perceptions of power and control. These perceptions clash vehemently with the vulnerability that comes with loving another and the emotions it evokes, thus condemning men to an internal prison of shame and self-betrayal. Created using a gaming engine, the film aims to confront this dilemma and hints at the need to adopt a more nuanced version of masculinity - one where the self is no longer compromised to cater to the insecurities of the many.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Mirielle Alina Rohr – Girls Manufactured

by Mirielle Alina Rohr

Girls Manufactured is a series of five ceramic vases, each representing a social media–driven aesthetic identity such as the Tradwife or Femme Fatale. These identities commodify femininity through strict visual and lifestyle codes that often lean towards conservative ideals and pleasing the male gaze. The photographer generated images with AI using datasets that I tied to each identity and integrated her own face to reflect her dual role as viewer and target scrolling through social media. The images I then transferred onto the vases using a technique that merges image and clay. The vases reference femininity through containment and decoration, while their form, based on Panathenaic amphorae, once awarded to male victors in ancient Greece, links ancient symbols of patriarchy to today's curated ideals.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Jose Martin Martinez – L’Eternité Reste

by Jose Martin Martinez

Briefly after leaving his country, the photographer met his first friends, Serhii and Yelyzaveta, two Ukrainian teenagers, and past lovers, forced to flee together the Russian occupation of Ukraine. Thus, a two year passage begun, with the trials and tribulations that come from love, death, war and solitude. L'Eternité Reste (Eternity Remains) is a documentation, at times abstract, at times literal, often cinematographic, of this story. An unapologetic coming of age story, released from the idealized, fantastic and vulgar narratives showcased in Hollywood and social media. This book functions as an "exchange currency" of sorts against the distorted social apparatus of "reality". Furthermore, the book, pretends to leave an indelible record of this "love story", inextricably linked to a contemporary historical conflict.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Eva Manuela Rivas Bao – An Italian Story

by Eva Manuela Rivas Bao

Starting from the trial of former Italian president Berlusconi, An Italian Story examines Italian-Moroccan model and aspiring sports journalist Imane Fadil. Attending the ex-president’s parties, she was a key witness, confessing abuse of power and underage prostitution at his residence in Arcore, near Milan. In 2019, she died at 34, weeks after announcing her upcoming book. Berlusconi reduced the representation of women in Italy to few pixels. The book manipulates "photographic leftovers" and documentary pictures at Imane’s Milan house with AI, aiming to recreate missing images that Fadil shared in court. Deconstructing "an Italian story" - famouspropaganda zine of the ex-president - to reconstruct another Italian story, a collective memory from the rubble of the "Italian failed Me Too" (2010-2023).

PHOTOGRAPHY

Doyoung Kim – Flattened Roughness

by Doyoung Kim

The work Flattened Roughness explores war image consumption and resulting guilt. The photographer collects and prints images of death then lick and absorb them physically, confronting the emotional and physical distance created by media. Suicide drones’ cameras constantly calculate distance to humans for destruction. In this process, the distance between humans is forgotten. To overcome this distance, he brings the images into my body. This act, where intimacy and brutality coexist, transforms voyeurism into mourning and care, confronting my lost humanity. Through sensory performance, he bridges the gap between himself and mediated death, exploring the clash of dulled emotion and sensation. This confessional, physically exhausting work explores alternative sensory approaches for the recovery of broken humanity.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Visvaldas Morkevicius – Ergot

by Visvaldas Morkevicius

Ergot is a toxic fungus used as a metaphor for digital intoxication. Drawing on psychopolitics, simulacra, and techno-feudalism, this work explores how identity, pleasure, and power are distorted under platform capitalism. It constructs a pixel world of hypermasculine avatars, stylised violence, and dopamine-fuelled objects using AI, CGI, photogrammetry, and glitch. Vapes, crystals, and supplements reflect commodified desire, while dancing police and custom weapons expose gamified violence. Realised as a triptych of three 110×250 cm plexiglass panels, the piece mirrors the seductive toxicity it critiques.

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Daniel Martinez – A River Has No Shore

by Daniel Martinez

Flowing from an Alpine glacier to the Mediterranean Sea, the Rhône River runs through ice caves, forests, cities and industrial sites. It sustains ecosystems, defines geographies and connects cultures across space and time. However, the boundless flux of the world’s waters today faces increasing stories of tragedy and collapse. Climate change doesn’t manifest only on a material level but also overwhelms the emotional dimension of human life. Today, the psychological toll of environmental crisis amplifies states of eco-anxiety and solastalgia, triggered by lived experiences, mediated imagery and narratives of apocalyptic breakdown. A River Has No Shore reflects on the distress caused by climate change and its representation by looking at the water along the Rhône River in its endless forms.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Elisa Azevedo – Daydream

by Elisa Azevedo

Daydream is an intimate exploration of sexuality, embodiment, and the search for connection in a world increasingly shaped by performance and consumption. The photographic series began with an investigation of highly sexualized spaces — environments where the body often appears fragmented, mediated, and as a representation. Present, yet absent, lingering only as a trace of desire. By reenacting some of these gestures herself, the photographer embodies a role and expectation that she cannot naturally fulfill. This performative process reveals the dissonance between imposed ideals and personal reality. Through photography, feelings of loneliness, inadequacy, and vulnerability are confronted — but also curiosity, longing, and the wish for a more sincere relation to her own body and her own sense of intimacy.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Min Dai – Rate My Cake

by Min Dai

Rate My Cake is a project about hunger — for sugar, for attention, for love. It is an attempt to stay with that hunger. To let it speak – not in language, but in images. The project is realised with artificial intelligence, although the word ‘realised’ seems too simplistic here. The machine and the photographer coexisted, reflected each other. It was like whispering secrets into a dark well and watching strange, sweet shapes emerge. The cakes in the images are not real. They’re too soft, too glossy, too wrong in just the right way. They’re overlit, undercooked, melting. They seem to wait for something too – approval, attention, maybe love.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Francesca Bergamini – Pretty in Pink

by Francesca Bergamini

When male desire turns into violence, it often begins with the objectification of the female body. Pretty in Pink reclaims those bodies: low-res thumbnails of 3D nude female models—created by male designers for digital porn, idealized and passive—are altered using the same 3D tools that shaped them. The curves stop seducing. They become hostile, almost threatening. 3D-printed at life-size, these figures stand like anti-monuments, exposing outdated power. Installed as a narrative path, from glossy pink columns to a white-on-white final piece, the viewer moves through stages of desire, distortion, and fear. What was once virtually consumed by the male gaze now returns with physical weight, uncensored presence, and resistance.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Eriko Miyata – Chronicle Void

by Eriko Miyata

Chronicle Void explores how Japanese pop culture portrays women and shapes societal attitudes, especially around normalized sexual harassment. Growing up female in Japan and later moving to Europe revealed to the photographer how deep implicit biases run across cultures. This video installation blends personal memories with public symbols like anti-harassment signs. Using biased AI filters on childhood photos, she reveals how memory and identity are shaped by social bias. Referencing Japan's selfie culture, the photographer experiments with AI and video to critique identity, memory, and cultural influence.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Soft Photography

with Salomé Chatriot, Charlie Engman, Simon Lehner Milo Keller, Marco De Mutiis, Claus Gunti, Clément Lambelet, Giulia Bini, Simone Niquille

Soft Photography is a research project conducted by the Master of Photography at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne with the support of the HES-SO. It aims to shed light on the role of human emotions in the creation and reception of images produced using generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) or computer-generated imagery (CGI).

PHOTOGRAPHY

Contemporary Photography - Spring 2025 - MAP1

with Kim Knoppers

Do Not Disturb – Curating in Progress The course Do Not Disturb – Curating in Progress is designed to give students a sneak peek into the craft of curating an exhibition from the perspective of an independent curator (formerly at Foam, Amsterdam 2011-2021). The course teaches to engage with the historical, theoretical, and practical matters of curating a photography exhibition, with issues regarding the desperate desire of mankind to display objects, the photography exhibition in the digital age, the blending of photography with other disciplines in a physical space, Imaging the Anthropocene and Photography in Times of Radical Change. Students were invited to create a group exhibition with a physical model and an online solo exhibition with their own work.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Self-Initiated Project - Spring 2025 - MAP1

with Bruno Ceschel

PHOTOGRAPHY

Applied Photography - Spring 2025 - MAP1

with Charlie Engman

This course explores contradiction, ambiguity, and authorship in photographic meaning and the role of aesthetics in shaping an image’s function across contexts. Photography operates in a complex space where visual style, context, and audience expectations interact to produce meaning. This course asks students to examine how photographic aesthetics influence interpretation and how an image’s function shifts when adapted for different applied photography frameworks. This course explores contradiction and ambiguity in photographic meaning and the role of aesthetic conventions in shaping an image’s function across contexts. Through the course, students will be expected to develop a coherent series of at least 10 images that applies a distinct treatment or aesthetic to a subject matter or multi-image narrative not typically represented in that style or aesthetic. Through this process, students will examine how visual codes, contextual shifts, and aesthetic strategies influence interpretation.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Materialized Photography- Spring 2025 - MAP1

with Felicity Hammond

In this module, we will explore the potential for the photographic image to simultaneously be a backdrop, object, and prop. We will make images both for the purpose of being re-imaged and for their sculptural possibilities, ending in a work that investigates the potential for an endless cycle of images and objects. Crucially, we will consider the staging of the work, and the conceptual and physical site for which it is intended.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Workshop - Simon Lehner

with Simon Lehner, Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet

For this workshop, ECAL invited Simon Lehner, a Vienna-based visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans photography, 3D rendering, AI-generated imagery, lens-based paintings, and sculptures. Social media algorithms manipulate memory and emotions by trapping users in echo chambers of repetitive imagery and ideas. These visual cycles exploit memory processes, triggering emotional responses—such as fear, envy, or desire—that reinforce behavioral patterns. Corporations leverage photographic images to target insecurities, activating primal instincts to drive consumption and engagement. Before the workshop, students were invited to reflect on their personal echo chambers—encountered on their social media feeds. They were asked to think about the following: • What trends or niches were suggested to you? • Which emotions played a role in these trends? • What emotional responses did they trigger in you? By analyzing these patterns, students gained insight into how photographic images and algorithms influence memory, emotions, and behavior. This critical awareness serveed as a foundation for exploring the broader societal implications of visual media.

PHOTOGRAPHY

We Do The Rest - PERFORMANCE WORKSHOP & EXHIBITION

with Augustin Lignier, Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet

From image capture to distribution, "We do the Rest" explores the notions of effort and bodily constraint in contemporary photographic mechanics. Through a series of spectacular and deceptive per-formances, Master Photography students at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne translate the gestures and the actions of visual fabrication with humor and absurdity. The project, conducted by Augustin Lignier, recalls the radical performances of the 60%, revisited in the digital age, when audiences are mainly virtual, and relationships are reduced to pixels. In search of permanent validation, we evolve in a digital theater governed by cameras, screens, and algorithms. We invite you to dive into these simulations, for real. And it's up to you to press the shutter... "We do the Rest" was created as a workshop during the second semester and was further developed in Italy, where it celebrated its premiere at the Biennale dell'Immagine di Chiasso. The constantly reimagined project was later presented at the Rencontres d'Arles 2024 photography festival, where it found a wide audience. The third and final edition was presented at ECAL in September 2024, closing the circle and illustrating the dynamic development process.

PHOTOGRAPHY

SELF-INITIATED PROJECT - Automn 2024 - MAP2

with Katy Hundertmark

PHOTOGRAPHY

Materialized Photography - Automn – 2024

with Alix Marie

This course led by Alix Marie explored the creation and invention of visual languages for lens-based photographic objects and focused on the transformation of images into materialised forms. Students explored the practices of contemporary artists such as Katja Novitskova, Thomas Ruff, Seth Price and others and learnt how technologies such as CGI and photogrammetry have influenced artistic expression. The students explored the interplay between digital and physical spaces and developed unique approaches to creating photographic objects. The course focused on understanding historical and contemporary trends, analysing artists' case studies and creating materialised works, including single images, 3D objects, installations and immersive media such as AR and VR. Through research and practice, students conceptualised and materialised projects and presented their work as physical installations or objects. They developed the ability to articulate the meaning behind their creations, critique and collaborate with colleagues to expand their artistic practice.

PHOTOGRAPHY

ECAL x AREA OF WORK - CO-EXISTENCE

with Area Of Work, Milo Keller

ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne has teamed up with Paris-based studio Area of Work at Paris Photo to present CO-EXISTENCE, a monumental immersive installation in the heart of Paris’s 11th arrondissement, from 7 to 9 November 2024. In a large metropolis, a small, seemingly empty apartment reveals discreet traces of human presence. On another scale, a conquering population manifests itself. Wings flap, slime trails, antennae shivers... In the industrial setting of the former Garage République in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, CO-EXISTENCE showcases a living cohabitation through a sequence of artificial images created using Computer Generated Imagery (CGI). These spectacular yet intimate photo-realistic projections highlight the imperceptible, the infra- thin, and the invisible, blurring the scales between micro and macro. Developed during three series of workshops conducted from 2023 to autumn 2024 by Area of Work, CO- EXISTENCE bears witness to the technical and artistic skills that are honed within the ECAL MA Photography. These workshops enabled students to transpose their photographic skills into the virtual space of 3D graphics to understand the temporal, artistic, and commercial issues involved in creating CGI. ‘This collaboration offered ECAL students an introduction to the tools and possibilities of 3D graphics, exploring their integration into the processes of creating photorealistic and hyper-realistic images, while highlighting the importance of the artistic and cinematographic dimensions that are at the heart of our identity.’ – Amine Ghorab & Scott Renau, Area of Work, Paris. Founded in Paris in 2018 by artists and directors Amine Ghorab and Scott Renau, Area of Work is known for its distinctive contemporary visual narratives, blending graphic framing and rigorous photographic direction. Specialising in fashion, luxury, and technology, the creative studio has become a major player in contemporary visual storytelling..

PHOTOGRAPHY

Self-Initiated Project - Fall 2024 - MAP1

with Milo Keller

PHOTOGRAPHY

Applied Photography - Fall – 2024

with Charles Negre

This course focuses on the ability to answer a commission within one’s own artistic practice, guiding students towards a deeper understanding of studio photography, the challenges of constructed images and the processes involved. With an emphasis on still life photography, this applied photography course aims to sharpen the students sensivity to photographing and interpreting objects. For this semester, the group of students will conceptualize, shoot, and designed an alternative issue of Paperboy Magazine. Founded by David McKendrick three years ago, Paperboy will serve as the creative platform for this project.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Photobook - Fall 2024 - MAP1

with Bruno Ceschel

The photobook module introduces students to the history of photobooks and artists’ books and leads them to consider different strategies and approaches to contemporary book-making. In the first term students individually conceptualised a publication that have been designed, printed and distributed.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Riccardo Fasana – Cozy Threshold

by Riccardo Fasana

Cozy Threshold is a collection of digital photo collages which takes into exam spaces of transience within the domestic environment. In order to question the gaze which usually inhabits these interior spaces in the course of one’s everyday routine, the images included in the project present visible distortions which reveal the collage technique employed in their creation. As the layered nature of these digital reconstruction of actual spaces gradually unfolds in front of the viewer’s eyes, the gap between what is being observed and what might have been initially recognized becomes clearer. Through this work, viewers are therefore invited to reflect on the space in which these images exist by engaging in a detailed observation of the stage of everyday life.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Tanguy Morvan – We All Walk On Empty Staircases

by Tanguy Morvan

We All Walk On Empty Staircases reflects the deep scars of the artist's childhood traumas. Growing up in a violent and tormented environment left permanent marks on his mind. At the age of seven, he found refuge in the game World of Warcraft, where he immersed himself for sixteen years, creating an idealized version of himself. In recent years, his grandfather introduced him to the Masonic world, which deepened his fascination with rituals. For the past six months, he has been transforming his body through tattooing, a process that has allowed him to regain control over both his mind and body while staying connected to past memories. His project invites reflection on the impact of domestic violence and the healing power of rituals.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Tianyu Wang – Hiding and Seeking

by Tianyu Wang

I focused on the invisible violence and oppression against women within the family environment. I deconstruct the postures women should take in their daily life to resist patriarchal culture. From personal experiences, I reconsider the scenes of family violence, the immediate feelings, the "body memory". I create scenes that blend reality and imagination, symbolically representing the self that is imprisoned, oppressed, and resisting within the family environment. My work responds to the everyday, breaking traditional discipline imposed on women within the family, and deconstructing the facade of daily life. This fundamentally critiques and resists the power dynamics of the traditional binary gender structure represented by "home", as well as the discipline and oppression of individuals.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Isabella Madrid – Buena, Bonita, y Barata

by Isabella Madrid

As a Latin American woman, I have grown up with very specific expectations of the kind of woman I should be. In my project, I am reversing the codes that have been forced onto me and immersing myself in the different symbols of how Colombian women exist and have been represented through photographic self portraits. I am taking these symbols and subverting them, enacting them, letting them hold a weight on me, holding my own weight on them, playing with them, letting them define me and simultaneously redefining their power and meaning. I am showcasing not only the everlasting colonial violence Colombian female bodies have always been subjected to but simultaneously reappropriating the narrative around them, playing the muse, model, photographer, stylist, makeup artist, and art director.

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Course

Know-how

Years

Clara Stote – My Favorite Place on Earth Was Huntington, Long Island

Binyu Lin – Still Cruising

Thomas Martin – To Dream a Night, Gently, Through a Glass, Darkly

Lóa Fenzy – Remy

Xiao Fu – The Surrogate

Elisa Hampe – Through My Hands, Broken into Fingers

Julieta Tarraubella – Archaeology of Birth

Andrey Lopatin – Flies

Zhiyue Liu – Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones

Gaia Pierobon – Sara

Workshop - Rachel de Joode - 2026

Self-Initiated Project - Fall 2025 - MAP2

Soft Photography - Fall 2025 - MAP2

Materialized Photography - Fall 2025 - MAP2

Self-Initiated Project - Fall 2025 - MAP1

Workshop - Simone C Niquille - 2025

Applied Photography - Automne 2025 - MAP1

Contemporary Photography - Fall 2025 - MAP1

Workshop - CGI WITH AREA OF WORK – 2025

ECAL at OFFPRINT Paris 2025

ECAL x PAPERBOY

Riccardo Androni – Exhaustion

Nabarun Gogoi – The Swan

Mirielle Alina Rohr – Girls Manufactured

Jose Martin Martinez – L’Eternité Reste

Eva Manuela Rivas Bao – An Italian Story

Doyoung Kim – Flattened Roughness

Visvaldas Morkevicius – Ergot

Daniel Martinez – A River Has No Shore

Elisa Azevedo – Daydream

Min Dai – Rate My Cake

Francesca Bergamini – Pretty in Pink

Eriko Miyata – Chronicle Void

Soft Photography

Contemporary Photography - Spring 2025 - MAP1

Self-Initiated Project - Spring 2025 - MAP1

Applied Photography - Spring 2025 - MAP1

Materialized Photography- Spring 2025 - MAP1

Workshop - Simon Lehner

We Do The Rest - PERFORMANCE WORKSHOP & EXHIBITION

SELF-INITIATED PROJECT - Automn 2024 - MAP2

Materialized Photography - Automn – 2024

ECAL x AREA OF WORK - CO-EXISTENCE

Self-Initiated Project - Fall 2024 - MAP1

Applied Photography - Fall – 2024

Photobook - Fall 2024 - MAP1

Riccardo Fasana – Cozy Threshold

Tanguy Morvan – We All Walk On Empty Staircases

Tianyu Wang – Hiding and Seeking

Isabella Madrid – Buena, Bonita, y Barata