THE REAL STARS OF CANNES

A portrait series of the people who actually live and work there during the Festival, who never end up in front of the cameras: the street cleaner, the soft-serve seller, the tailoring couple working through the nights so the dresses are ready in time.

Do the people who actually live in Cannes hate the festival?

Last May, photographer Johanna Berghorn went to find out — without a plan, without her voice, and without a single word of French. She came back with a portrait series of the people the cameras never point at.

THE REAL STARS OF CANNES

I lost my voice on day one. Like fully. Gone. Arrived in the evening, dinner was loud, I talked over too many people and woke up the next morning with nothing. Not a great start to a festival where the plan is to photograph people and ask them questions.

It was my first Cannes after having my baby. I never actually stopped shooting, not for a second, but from the outside something shifts the moment you become a mother. She has a kid now, she’s probably not as available, probably not as into it. I had fewer bookings than usual and I felt it. (Very funny how society wants you back at work right away while stigmatising women the moment they have a child, making it harder than ever, but that’s for another one.)

A friend told me what friends tell you when they love you: do something for yourself. Make a personal project. You used to do that. She’d also just had a conversation with someone who swore the people who actually live in Cannes can’t stand the festival. Too loud, too much, in the way of everything. I had more time than usual. I had a question. And I had the strong urge to just shoot, the way I used to.

Documentary work is how I came to photography in the first place, and I hadn’t done anything like it in years. So with no voice and the French of a confused tourist, I typed a question into Google Translate and walked around Cannes holding up my phone like a little sign. The phone was going to do the talking either way.

I asked the man cleaning the streets, a taxi driver, the cook and the lifeguard from the Ritz-Carlton. I asked the couple with their tiny tailoring shop, who get the stylists of huge stars walking in during the festival and barely sleep for three weeks and love every second of it. They forced me to stay and drink something with them, sent me off with gifts and couldn’t quite believe someone had come for them and not the dresses. I asked a security woman on her break. I asked women who had come to the beach for the day and clearly weren’t going anywhere - set up, dug in, watching the scene unfold like it had been staged for them. I asked Francesca, who had picked this particular morning for her first swim of the year and dressed for it like the camera was already there. She talked in cinema, gestured in cinema, posed as if she’d been preparing for exactly this her whole life. Something about a former life as a ballerina, I think (my crappy French couldn’t keep up with her fast one). But it didn’t matter anyway. She was clearly enjoying her very own Cannes moment.

I asked François, the man selling soft serve from one of those little pointed huts along the Croisette, who I walked past every morning and ended up having a daily little chat with, which became, somehow, my favourite part of the trip. François has probably handed a coffee or an ice cream to half the people who’ve ever come to Cannes. He’s also, by some distance, the festival’s most devoted fan: day one he sent me away with a stack of brochures about the area, day two with an official merch cap. He felt like part of the whole thing. And he was.

I asked the flâneurs, of which there are many in Cannes during the festival, drifting up and down the Croisette with the kind of slow, deliberate walk of someone who very much hopes to be looked at, and who, you suspect, planned the outfit for exactly that. And I asked the ones who weren’t walking at all, who had claimed their spots along the Croisette, watching the spectacle unfold and quietly enjoying being part of it.

I expected the answer my friend’s friend had described. Nobody gave it to me. Every single person I spoke to loved the festival, was excited by it, and, above all, proud of it. The street cleaner, who didn’t want his face shown because he was on the clock, told me he likes what it brings to the city. Jiyan from the tailoring shop, exhausted and lit up, called it the busiest and most beautiful weeks of the year, proudly pulling up photos of last year’s red carpet dresses she’d helped make. Francesca, by the time I left her, was practically running her own premiere. And François, scooping soft serve at his little hut, was surely the proudest of them all.

Twenty-five people isn’t a study, I know. But it came back the same every single time, and after a while I stopped waiting to hear anything else.

What I came back with wasn’t the answer. It was them. The ones working through the night so a dress is ready at 7am. The ones sweeping the streets before the city wakes up. The ones scooping soft serve at the same little hut every morning. The ones who live there year-round and watch the whole circus arrive and leave again and find it, somehow, wonderful.

The real stars of Cannes.