Jean-Christophe Bardot, Bernard Baudin, Sophie Carlier, Éric Facon, Marc Gibert,
Alex Jordan, André Lejarre, Olivier Pasquiers, Caroline Pottier et Nicolas Quinette
 
  2008, Back in Lorraine
by the photographers of Bar Floréal Collective
  In 1979 in Longwy in Lorraine (France), the closing down of steel plants announces unprecedented social upheaval. The workers area become the seat of strikes and numerous unrests, and is where you can meet: Marcel Trillat on the famous radio Lorraine Heart of Steel, or hear photographer Andre Lejarre and Alex Jordan from Grapus who build together Bar Floréal Collective. Coming back to these issues nowadays offers a singular answer to the theme of 2008 Mois de la Photo in Paris on Europe "between tradition and change". All the photographers who are now members of the collective, side by side with the strict and radical black and white of the first Leicas, put forward a variety of subjects, sizes and shades, which confronts different eras and points of view. Portraits, situations, traces found around a café in the city, next to the vast shopping precinct, "no-man’s-land" invaded with an absurd saturation of signs, at the real and symbolic borders of the country, attentive to the most vulnerable ones, interfering in the world of the youth or in the intergenerational relationships, getting close to the scars – of faces, landscapes – or to the objects supposed to heal the wounds of injured humanity. At the heart of the issue assumed by those affected witnesses, beyond the aesthetics of disenchantment of the before and after: how is it possible to weave worthily the story of such a development with the tool of photography, its limitations and inexhaustible resources ?