Biographie
Born in 1991 Cédric Calandraud graduated in sociology and documentary cinema from University Paris 7 and he is a member of the agency Hans Lucas. He has had several exhibitions and taken part in several festivals, such as Off du Festival at Arles (France) with the collective exhibition “Supernatural”, in Italy for the Festival Fotografia Europea, in Paris for the “What’s up Photo Doc” fair in May 2017, in Bulgaria for the International Photography Biennale of Phodar and at the European House of Photography in Paris for a collective projection.
Présentation
"I took these photos during my adolescence, between 10 and 17 years old, in the village of Yvrac, in the south west of France, where I grew up. At that time I took lots of photos with a disposable camera of the numerous family reunions where there was always something to celebrate – a christening, a birthday, a wedding, etc.
These moments of festivity were, naturally, only one aspect of our lives: a distraction after a week of work. You never photographed the worst moments. It’s that in fact that struck me on rediscovering these images piled in a corner of my teenage bedroom. A number of people shown in these photos were struck down by illness or alcoholism, amongst them my father, who died during this period. Others lost their houses, their family or their jobs. These are the images that are the most powerful in my mind, but which are completely absent from the photos themselves.
In order to rediscover the forgotten part of my family history, I decided to reclaim them. Since the negatives had not been kept, I worked directly on the prints, often already damaged. By effacing the eyes, by isolating the details or the bodies, or by masking parts out, I hope to give new life to these images, isolated from their time and their reality, in the hope that those forgotten moments resurface around these photos.
The title of this series is a reference to a symbolic date, that of the summer of ’98, which was a milestone in my life as a child. I was barely seven years old, but I remember that summer as one of my first experiences – the experience of happiness, of love and of death".