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Château de Maisons (Maisons-Laffite, Yvelines, France)
The first advice given to the pupils after an overview visit to
the building and the distribution of cameras is to avoid being
tempted by the post-card view.
This year’s theme, the Visible and the Invisible, offers a key for
avoiding clichés.
Faced with the urge to take some photographs, prior explanation
is useless, as far as technique is concerned. Subsequent analysis
of the picures allows us to set forth the ideas of framing,
perspective, colour, contrast, etc., and to see to whether the
images are in tune with the theme.
Now there is a chance for the initiated students to re-take, or
to perfect, the picures taken as an initial sketch. The results
are astonishing, obtained within very short time periods: two
sessions of two hours, during which the students come closer
to the château and its environment.
“Photographing” at the Villa Savoye
Photographing at the Villa Savoye is not necessarily the same as
photographing the Villa Savoye… this issue has to be understood
if the young people who take the pictures are to understand the
monument in its entirety and with all its nuances.
The central-government ministries of culture and of education
work together on artistic and cultural education. One of the
missions of the education service at the Villa Savoye is to respond
to this confluence by establishing links between the past and the
present. It seeks to provide an education for the eye that is relevant
to everybody, students or part-time students as well as to a more
informed public, just as much as to searching artists. It is thus a
matter of questioning the monument as what it is today. How to
become aware of its contemporaneousness without sacralizing it?
How to make it visible and accessible to everyone? How to reveal it
in all its uniqueness?
Seeing and showing is what the photographic experience consists
of, exercising the eye of the young participants by means of a given
theme, motivating (in the sense in which the “motif motivates”)
and the motif is architecture. Learning to see is an instance of
education. We cannot see unless we are ready for this vision.
Opening up fields of disciplines allows an interplay between
knowing and feeling. Continuing the work outside the walls of the
school by photographing the walls of monuments; is this not a rewriting
of what these places have become in the present, a hymn to photography, written in light?
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