PODCAST: Meeting with Brice Dossin and Paul Hennebelle

As part of the 10th arrondissement's Rencontres photographiques, the Union des Photographes Professionnels discovered the photographers exhibited this year through podcasts.

Listen to Brice Dossin and Paul Hennebelle: https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbNnDV0Pd7E

Brice Dossin

A few words to introduce yourself:

You were born in Normandy in 1975 and lived in a small, isolated town until you were 18. Self-taught, you are very attached to the human and to "social photography". Since 2014, you've been building photographic series around the mass consumption of our societies, their excesses and frivolity. Through saturated colors with an almost plastic appearance, you focus your attention on the surface of things in order to question their hidden dimension. Your "Airpocalypse" series was selected for the Prix Voies-Off at Arles 2018. In 2020, you will publish your first book "Xmas Vindaloo" with Dewi Lewis Publishing.

Can you tell us about your work?

Xmas Vindaloo tells the story of Christmas in Goa, a small Christian enclave on India's west coast with a sulphurous reputation. A former Portuguese trading post, Goa became famous in the West in the 1960s for hosting hippie communities. Today, Goa is an unlikely mix of retired hippies, electronic music fans, Indian tourists, baba cools, stray dogs and undomesticated cows, all with a pinch of local spice.

During his stay in this unique seaside resort, the author more than once encountered Jesus, Santa Claus, scary sacred cows, crazy-looking dogs, tattooed ravers, mustachioed dreamers, whirling stoners, colorful jugglers, yoga masters and levitating mystics.A real Christmas tale under the relentless Indian sun!

Paul Hennebelle

A few words to introduce yourself:

Born in New York in 1992, you are a Franco-American photographer living between Paris and Beirut.

Graduated in photography at Septante-Cinq (Brussels) in 2016. Your work deals with questions of identity and relationship to territory. Since 2016, you have been working in Beirut on a documentary that draws a parallel between the reconstruction of Beirut and Lebanese youth.

Can you tell us about your work?

The Brown Eyes and Sand project draws a parallel between the reconstruction of Beirut and the feeling of claustrophobia felt by most young Lebanese. It recounts the genesis of the national uprising and the economic and political crisis that has gripped the country since October 2019.

The Lebanese capital is a perpetual construction site, and the young people here have been shaped by the rhythm of the jackhammers. In total disorder, skyscrapers grow inexorably, gradually blocking the view of the Mediterranean horizon. New ruins interweave with old ones, forming a jigsaw puzzle whose random slicing fragments the landscape even further. Beirut's youth are still searching for an identity, trying to forget a past that has been imposed on them. Every day, they remake the world and make plans to escape.

The Mediterranean Sea is the embodiment of this in-between world: an open and closed space, at once the limit of urban wandering and the hope of leaving for other cities. And behind the large sails covering the unfinished buildings, a new city is in the making. But the proud, disillusioned young Lebanese are already looking towards the white sea. Infinite goodbyes and perpetual returns.