Claude Baechtold
PETZI ET LA BOMBE A NEUTRONS
12 November - 20 December 2014
Opening on Wednesday November 12, 6:30pm

CLAUDE BAECHTOLD

Born in 1972, Claude Baechold is a graduate from the ECAL / Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne. In 2001, he travels to Iran and starts a compulsive photographic work of visual classifications for which he receives the Prix fédéral d’arts appliqués. In 2002, he gets stuck with the journalist Serge Michel and the photographer Paolo Woods at the River Boom in Afghanistan. They found together Riverboom, a collective aiming to approach the unpopular fields of photography like touristic photography, travel guides or picture stories. In 2012, he realizes his first movie in Nollywood – Lagos (Nigeria). There, he founds the cinema collective Le Cowboy noir.

Claude Baechtold permanently develops his memory work. Upholder of the “nouveau reportage”, photography is for him a mean and not a goal : an act of ordering the world. He has the remembrance of those who tell stories, can abstract and generalize.

PETZI ET LA BOMBE A NEUTRON

Done in 2007 ” Pôle Nord ” is a photographic guide to the great North : playing with the clichés on this unaccessible and distant territory, he delivers a documentary that is both out of wall and relevant.
Playing with atypical forms and using humor to give his gaze on the world, Claude Beachtold reinterprets the images taken eight years ago in Siorapaluk, the most northern village of the planet. Starting from the documentary produced by the Foundation Vevey ville d’images in 2006, he explores the picture story with a previously unseen installation.

Permanent space of the Festival Images, Quai1 dedicates itself to contemporary photography by presenting five exhibitions per year of photographers who participated to the Vevey International Photography Award. The last exhibition of the year is always dedicated to one winner of this prize. Thus, after Paolo Nozolino, Bogdan Konopka, Wolfgang Stahr and Aglaia Konrad, it is Claude Beachtold’s turn to present the work with which he received this grant in 2006.