The project Un journal (A Newspaper) grew out of the wish of Le Point du Jour, an art centre and publishing house devoted to photography in Cherbourg-en-Cotentin, to work with residential facilities for older people in the town and to offer them an artistic practice.
From April to October 2019, workshops were offered to some ten residents of two independent-living residences, Le Vieux Château and Les Roquettes, with one central aim: to create, together, a 40-page newspaper-album made of photographs taken in the town and family photographs.
Equipped with cameras, we went on several walks around the town. Sometimes they led to places that had mattered in the lives of some of the participants. The person who invited us there would tell us about it. Memories surfaced on contact with things and spaces. Places we might have passed through without paying attention came alive through the words exchanged and through the act of photographing. This is how we went to the spot where Marie-Thérèse was born; all that remains today are the barely visible traces of the staircase and the wash house in the courtyard. We also went on more touristic outings, meant to show Cherbourg and its surroundings to the Parisian that I am, and to the future readers of the newspaper-album: the old harbour of Le Becquet, the Montagne du Roule, the Emmanuel-Liais park…
Working with family photographs was the occasion for another kind of sharing. At the first session, I stressed the importance of family archives, which, despite their private use, can also interest people outside the family because of their universal character. I asked the residents who wished to do so to bring their photographs to the next session so that we could look at them together. The following week, some brought albums or boxes overflowing with photographs from different periods and of every kind (official photographs, black-and-white prints with scalloped edges, Kodak colour prints, Polaroids…); other participants, on the contrary, had only one or two images, having lost their archives over the years. We spent several sessions choosing the images, helped by Peggy Baillievier and Valérie Martin, the two activity coordinators.
One recognises the family rituals that are commonly photographed: christenings, weddings, official portraits, holidays… These images are like those of my own family; they are beautiful, they move me. Once the selection was complete, the participants entrusted me with their precious photographs so that I could make photocopies for the layout work, done with scissors and glue.
The images and texts, handwritten on the double pages of the newspaper’s mock-up, mix present and past; they tell of and show the town, a square, a market, a park, the father, the mother, a love, children, a trip to Egypt, a trade…
The newspaper, made up of one or two double-page spreads per participant, was printed in a handful of copies. It reproduces each person’s pages exactly as they were: no layout software was involved. All the participants came together in one of the two residences to discover the newspaper.
This gallery shows views of the workshops, a selection of double-page spreads from the newspaper and the participants’ original sheets.
Workshops designed and run by Le Point du Jour as part of Entre les images, a national arts and cultural education programme through and with photography, developed by the Diagonal network with the support of the French Ministry of Culture.