PHOTOGRAPHY

Nnormal × ECAL

with Nicolas Poillot

In September 2024, the start of the academic year was marked by the launch of a collaboration with the trail equipment brand Nnormal. At the same time, Kilian Jornet, the brand’s founder, made headlines by climbing 82 Alpine peaks over 4,000 meters, setting a new record. Like trail running, photography requires passion, discipline, and endurance. The Bachelor Photography students may not be athletes, but they pursue their own visual feats, pushing boundaries to craft a unique language in an image-saturated world. ECAL has a long tradition of collaborating with top-level professionals who are eager to share their experience with a new generation in search of direction. One such figure is Régis Tosetti, artistic director at Nnormal and a former Visual Communication graduate at ECAL, who initiated the project alongside Nicolas Poillot, head coach and art director, known for his blend of fashion and documentary work. A longtime guest lecturer at ECAL, Nicolas has guided students with clarity and precision through the brand’s visual identity. In a noisy world overloaded with stimuli, this collaboration offered students an escape into the mountains—a space for communion, imagination, and adventure. There, bodies and landscapes meet, connected by the shoes that allow us to go further. But beyond the object itself, the students’ projects express ecological values, contrasting atmospheres, organic and technical textures, and bodies straining toward effort and release. And as in trail running, despite careful preparation, the unexpected often leads to new forms of beauty.

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.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Photographic revelation

with Laurence Bonvin

Process The notion of Process, in the context of this course, can mean developing a project in which the students focus on the process rather than just the concept or the results. This should allow them to experiment, to look for new solutions, to explore unexpected paths, techniques and forms, to lose themselves and find themselves again. Sometimes we give up on an idea for fear of failure, of not having a strong enough idea or of not succeeding in producing sufficiently interesting images. The idea is for the students to free themselves from these injunctions so that they can explore their ideas, desires, obsessions and desires more freely.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Fine Art Photography

with Natacha Lesueur

Last minute risk As the students enter their final year of training at the ECAL, and their interests and methods take shape, it's time to take advantage of this last project to question our own rules, achievements and influences, not to be satisfied with them, and to take risks.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Dramatic portraiture

with Louie Banks

Returning to the basics and origins of photography will allow students to focus their energy and ideas meaningfully on their concept and subject.   Louie Banks provided them with three keywords to consider as a way to create photographs with more impact than what is typically expected from today’s editorials and campaigns. The students were free to draw inspiration from one of the following keywords or to try incorporating a bit of each into their project: "Movement," "Costume," "Emotion."

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

Fine Art Photography

with Natacha Lesueur

Documentary, the power of make-believe. Based on projects developed around a common theme, the students develop a personal, in-depth project around the theme of pretense. They build a project that plays with the limits of veracity in photography, using it as an artifice of deception.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Video

with Olivia Schenker

Hot N Cold 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.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Staged Photography

with Charlotte Krieger

The aim of this course is to introduce students to the creation and management of a complex photographic project involving sets, characters and lighting. The theme is free.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Workshop Digital Medium Format

with Anoush Abrar

Beauty shot The week-long Medium format digital workshop is both an introduction to shooting equipment and dedicated software. Students worked in groups to produce portrait images.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Applied Photography

with Calypso Mahieu

Waliking in Renens A collaborative project in which students were asked to choose a local shop in Renens and to create a documentary project combining images of still life, architecture and portraits.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Video

with Orsola Valenti

Hors-champ “Showing by hiding, revealing by stealing": for a political practice of the audiovisual image. The main aim of the course is to raise awareness of the political dimension of the audiovisual gesture and give students the tools to distinguish the cinematographic image from the media image. Whereas the latter - flattened, emptied and therefore interchangeable - overwhelms its receptor, rendering it powerless, the cinematographic image liberates emotion and critical reflection. In this way, it goes beyond the supposedly faithful representation of reality.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Fine Art Photography

with Natacha Lesueur

Seduce, they said Based on projects developed around the theme of seduction, students develop a personal, in-depth project over the whole semester.

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Workshop Photographic chamber

with Matthieu Gafsou

The workshop week 4x5 is both an introduction to the 4x5 technical camera and a way to kickstart a photographic project. Students experience the process of analog shooting, from development to large format printing. This intense week is highly technical, but also focused on developing a photographic language, allowing for a better understanding of the fundamental workings of photography.

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

Analog Medium Format Workshop

with Anoush Abrar

For this week's "sitter" theme, first-year photography students were asked to imagine a medium-format analog portrait. The term "sitter" was historically used in photography to designate the person posing for a portrait. This use dates back to the early days of photography, when long exposure times were necessary and subjects had to remain motionless for extended periods. The term reflected the idea that the person had to sit or hold a pose for the duration of the exposure. Now, as photography technology has evolved and exposure times have become shorter, the term "model" or "subject" has become more commonly used, reflecting a wider range of poses and activities beyond simply sitting.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Gaétan Uldry – I NO LONGER LOVE BLUE SKIES

by Gaétan Uldry

The drone is a machine for control, surveillance and suppression that is increasingly used and improved in its technological evolution. The drone acts as a prism that recreates a new reality, filtering and annihilating the real world. The image produced is a kind of mirage, devoid of meaning. The machine creates a deliberate feeling of distance with the need to confront death. This book highlights this new reality by collecting, cropping and assembling images produced by drones to denounce the absurdity and danger of these devices for carrying out violence. It questions the status of these images, whose plasticity and aesthetics obscure and conceal the true nature of their function, which remains to control, monitor and kill.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Vampire week

with Jean-Vincent Simonet

During one week, the students developed techniques that transform perception and the relationship with the corpus of images: erasure, displacement, loss of the sensation of reality.

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.

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

Workshop Paolo Wood

with Paolo Wood

It has been established that photography is a language. With all its limitations and peculiarities, but a language anyway. Photography is often a relatively poor language that constantly repeats the same nouns and verbs. In the documentary tradition, the range of subjects treated is quite limited and recurrent, and for this reason, in order to make photographs, one must learn and master this language: its vocabulary, its grammar and its history.

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.