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Far from reports as well as postcards, Stéphane Couturier's "hybridisations" reveal a port city that the old people of Sète, who were under the spell, thought they knew. Every year, Images singulières invites a renowned artist to take a look at the city. The styles of each of them - the Swede Anders Petersen (2008) or the Frenchman Richard Dumas (2014) - are immediately recognizable, but they all played the game of photographs taken on site. With the decision to choose Stéphane Couturier (born 1957) for this tenth event in documentary photography, the festival has completely changed its perspective. Unlike his predecessors, the photographer is a "plasticizer", i.e. he does not create reportages, but uses his images taken in the city as raw material, which he reworks and models on the computer. Sometimes to the point of unreality in the manner of a painter. Some of his "photographic paintings" on Sète are reminiscent of Fernand Léger's "Le Grand Tug" (1923) or the very graphic paintings of the Russian Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko from the late 1910s. However, it is impossible to equate his work with modern art. The artist does not make the city abstract. On the contrary, Stéphane Couturier transfigures it, reveals its soul, its past, its hidden face.
