Marc Donnadieu
Marc Donnadieu, a committed look at the image
Born in 1960 in Jerada, Morocco, Marc Donnadieu is an independent exhibition curator with a prestigious background. After serving as the chief curator of the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne (2017-2023), he led the FRAC Haute-Normandie from 1999 to 2010 and was a curator at LaM, the museum of modern, contemporary, and outsider art of Lille Metropolis, from 2010 to 2017.
A recognized specialist, he has signed numerous major monographic and thematic exhibitions, exploring contemporary photography, the pictorial field, drawing practices, representations of the body, as well as identities in current social spaces.
Prado (2021), Emmanuel Passeleu, photography
An active member of AICA France since 1997 and ICOM since 2010, Marc Donnadieu regularly collaborates with reference journals such as Art Press (since 1994) and The Art Newspaper (since 2023), and has contributed to numerous specialized catalogs and works.
As a curator for ArtMajeur by YourArt, he presents a selection showcased at the Rencontres Photographiques d’Arles 2025, around a theme dear to the event: "Family Stories." This selection, bathed in a summery atmosphere, evokes reunions and the awakening of new emotional ties. Photography, an intimate and luminous medium, reveals its strength by gently capturing these emerging family narratives.
Family Images (Indian Summer): A photographic tour
This photographic tour proposes, through renowned authors or emerging practitioners, to immerse in family stories related to the summer period, that moment when one leaves the ordinary of everyday life to experience vacation time differently, even to recomposing a distant or extended family, or even opening up to new romantic relationships. Photography, more than any other medium, is a writing where the intimate contends with the light. It thus allows for the delicate capture of these new social or family narratives, like the images of Hicham Ahyoud, Hervé Gergaud, or Anne-Marie Bertin.
Bubble gum, by Hervé Gergaud, Photography, 60x45 cm
The time of travel decomposes and recomposes by excellence into visual fragments. The works of Henry Pouillon, Jean-Michel Ratron, and Catherine Ballet perfectly illustrate this through effects of contrast, distortion, or layering typical of analog or digital photographic art.
For many, the beach is the emblematic territory of summer and vacations. Many gather there while isolating themselves from others. Cécile Ducrot, Emmanuel Passeleu, or Hégémon Chaignon attest to this. The image thus becomes panoramic and even reaches several meters in length in the case of Hégémon Chaignon to restore human fragility in the face of the vastness of the marine horizon. But the beach is also a conquest of the instantaneous and verticality through the snapshots of Gilliard Bressan or Sharlie Evans. One measures oneself against others as one embraces another in aerial figures of balance or imbalance.
Photography is also a matter of colors and graphics, as asserted with intensity by the sunsets of Ori Junior, Debbie Scott-Queenin, or Elke Matthaeus. The real intertwines with the imaginary during a light or deep sleep in the heart of which Luc Pallegoix inscribes totemic animal figures that are part game and part dream. And what if we played in the summer?...
Nicolas Sarazin