Christopher Anderson, Jean-Marie Donat and Kristine Potter at L’Appartement

The three artists featured in this 8th session of contemporary photography exhibitions at L'Appartement - Espace Images Vevey, Switzerland, are Christopher Anderson, Jean-Marie Donat and Kristine Potter.

Overview

For this eighth group of exhibits, L’Appartement showcases Christopher Anderson’s trilogy of family photographs in Les Chambres, and revives our memories of Christmas festivities at home with Jean-Marie Donat’s collection of portraits on display in Le Couloir. Kristine Potter, laureate of the Grand Prix Images Vevey, presents Dark Waters in Le Salon and Le Cinéma, evoking the domestic violence pervading the popular culture and landscape of southern USA.

Family Trilogy by Christopher Anderson

Christopher Anderson naturally began photographing his family after his son Atlas came into the world in 2008. When his daughter Pia was born, he continued the fatherly attempt to stop time and not let a single moment of this new life slip away. Marion features throughout these albums, as a woman, mother, and partner. As a documentary photographer, Christopher Anderson had never considered these personal photos as a ‘series’, but his opinion changed when war photographer Tim Hetherington pointed out that “They’re all about the passage of time.” Christopher Anderson began seeing his family pictures in a new light and realised that they may well be his best work. Pia, Son and Marion were published as three separate books, forming a unique and moving intimate family trilogy.

Christmas Nightmare by Jean-Marie Donat

Advertisements generally encourage us to picture Santa Claus as a cheerful chubby man with a bushy white beard and a smart red suit, always smiling and huggable. But what’s he really like? Collector Jean-Marie Donat scoured flea markets all over Europe to compile this extraordinary collection of photographs from the 1930s to the 1970s, in which we see the beloved myth become a nightmare of triviality and awkward clumsiness. This witty series seems most likely to confirm our childhood suspicions: Is Santa Claus just an ordinary man, after all?

Dark Waters by Kristine Potter

Kristine Potter’s latest photobook, Dark Waters, focuses on the violence that permeates the territory and popular culture of the USA. She contrasts a series of portraits of women with scenery that appears serene but is in fact views of places with sordid names, such as Murder Creek, Bloody River, and Rape Pond, evoking the domestic violence that allegedly took place there in the past. Drawing on the musical genre of murder ballads from the 19th and 20th centuries, Kristine Potter alludes to the flippant popular glorification of violence towards women that still pervades today’s cultural landscape.

Kristine Potter has enhanced her Dark Waters series of photographs with a video installation produced with musicians from Nashville USA where she is now based, recognised worldwide as the capital of country music. These folk guitarists play the murder ballads that are the beating heart of her photographic project: traditional songs that became iconic and that are still being recorded today, evoking vivid descriptions of battered and murdered women. Kristine Potter invites visitors into Le Cinéma in L’Appartement conveying the darkness of a concert hall in Tennessee to experience a fascinating and very moving musical escapade.