Raymond Depardon, Communes

Communes is a photographic essay by Raymond Depardon exploring the villages of France’s Mediterranean inland region. Its 80 black-and-white photographs were taken by Depardon in the summer of 2020, after France’s first lockdown, and cover the departments of Aveyron, Lozère, Gard and Hérault. These villages are timeless havens of peace, where tranquility and cool prevail. Witnesses to history, they were threatened by the ‘Nant concession’, a shale gas extraction project, but the inhabitants protested and the project was abandoned in 2015. The villages, with their cobbled streets, old houses with jagged facades and rustic construction, are once again thriving.

The photographs are accompanied by a text by Salomé Berlioux, president of the association Chemins d’Avenirs, an association that accompanies and promotes thousands of young people from isolated areas. Berlioux is also the author of Les Invisibles de la République. Comment sauver la jeunesse de la France périphérique?

(Robert Laffont, 2019) and Nos campagnes suspendes. La France périphérique face à la crise (Editions de l’Observatoire, 2020).

Author Biography

Born in 1942 in Villefranche-sur-Saône. Lives in Clamart. Filmmaker and photographer Raymond Depardon occupies a unique place in the field of contemporary images. Co-founder of the Gamma agency in 1967, he joined the Magnum agency in 1978 and covered stories all over the world until the early 1980s. Thereafter, while maintaining his daily practice of photography, he shot direct cinema documentary films. Raymond Depardon puts still and moving images to the service of a simple and unique style. From the first images taken in the early 1960s to his most recent trips to Africa and the USA, Raymond Depardon’s work is characterized by a profoundly human approach. In 2010, he presented the exhibition La France de Raymond Depardon at the Bibliothèque nationale de France François-Mitterrand in Paris, in 2013, the exhibition Un moment si doux at the Grand Palais in Paris, and in 2019. Raymond Depardon has directed with Claudine Nougaret many films for the cinema including Urgences (1988), La Captive du désert (1990), Délits flagrants (1994), 1974 Une partie de campagne (2002), Un homme sans l’occident (2003), 10e chambre, instants d’audiences (2004), La Vie moderne (2008), Journal de France (2012), Les Habitants (2016) and 12 jours (2017). For the Fondation Cartier, they have collaborated on a dozen exhibitions, leading to the installations of their films: Amours (1997), Déserts (2000), Chasseurs et Chamans (2003), 7 × 3 (2004), Donner la parole (2008), Au bonheur des Maths (2011), 8e étage (2014) and Mon arbre (2019).

Raymond Depardon has also published more than sixty photography books.