Under Deauville’s shifting skies, the 16th edition of the Planches Contact festival this year celebrates the photography of intimacy — a genre shared, in one way or another, by all photographers, who often begin by photographing family and friends before exploring more complex subjects.
Since its creation in 2010, the festival has transformed the Norman seaside town into a true laboratory of visual experimentation, blending public commissions, artist residencies, open-air exhibitions, and collaborations with major photographic institutions. All this in a family spirit that seems unchanged, even as a new team takes the helm this year: Jonas Tebib, artistic director, and Lionel Charrier, director of photography at French daily Libération, have succeeded Laura Serani as heads of the festival.
“Planches Contact was born from a simple idea: to invite photographers to offer a contemporary view of Deauville and its territory,” recalls Philippe Augier, mayor of the city and founder of the festival. It’s more than a slogan: each autumn, the town becomes an open-air gallery — along the beach, the Quai de l’Impératrice Eugénie, Les Franciscaines, and Point de Vue — where works produced in residence are shown for the first time. The guiding principle remains unchanged: no imported exhibitions, only works created in and for Deauville.
This ambitious project is also reflected in the artists’ experience. Invited for four two-week residencies, they describe warm exchanges, generous resources, and precious time for research and production. Each exhibiting artist also receives a €5,000 grant, in addition to the residency and production expenses covered by the festival — a substantial sum in the photography world, closer to a prize than a commission, and a notable contrast with the modest fees offered by larger festivals such as Arles.
Intimacy as a guiding thread
The 2025 edition, under the artistic direction of Jonas Tebib, explores intimacy in all its forms — distinguishing between the “intimate” and “intimacy.” In an era saturated with public imagery, the festival proposes a return to proximity, vulnerability, and the personal gaze. “Intimate photography is not self-absorption — it’s a way to explore our relationship to the world,” explains Tebib.
This is evident from the opening dialogue between Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman, presented at Les Franciscaines. The exhibition traces the origins of self-staging, identity as fiction, and intimacy as a form of resistance. As the festival’s curators note, for Cahun, “intimacy is not a fixed private sphere but a space for reinvention,” while for Sherman, “distance itself creates a paradoxical form of intimacy.” By placing these two pioneers at the start of the festival, Planches Contact defines its framework: intimacy is not confined to the family album; it can be political, constructed, performed.
The series presented by the 18 resident photographers each open singular paths between memory, identity, and territory. Chinese artist Lin Zhipeng (No. 223), a key figure of the Asian scene, continues in Deauville his exploration of a free, sensual intimacy — bodies in landscapes, youth, and desire. The festival describes it as “a joyful, erotic, and colorful intimacy” in a retrospective of his twenty-year career at Point de Vue. Lebanese photographer Myriam Boulos leads the festival’s first off-site residency from Beirut, continuing her work on the theme of intimacy. Her images from What’s Ours echo those produced in Normandy, reflecting the festival’s desire to open Deauville to other geographies of the personal.
Several other residencies explore the fragile border between territory and inner life. Carline Bourdelas draws inspiration from Bonjour Tristesse, evoking in Deauville the luminous melancholy of youth in suspension. Italian photographer Renato D’Agostin, a master of black and white, creates what the festival calls an “album of personal memories” drawn from the town — a love story replayed against the backdrop of seaside cinema. Julien Magre, known for his family narratives, departs from the domestic circle to address an imaginary figure of Deauville, “Madame S.,” inspired by the town’s own mythos — a poetic stroll through an emotional landscape. German artist Henrike Stahl revisits the princess myth by photographing today’s château dwellers, a contemporary reflection on privilege and solitude shot in a Normandy estate where she lived for part of her residency.
Two established names anchor the festival within a broader history of the body and landscape. Finnish-American photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen presents a new series of self-portraits made in Normandy, shown alongside a retrospective on the beach — a dialogue where intimacy literally passes through the body, nude within nature. At the other end of the spectrum, French portraitist Frédéric Stucin turns his lens toward the backstage world of Normandy’s cabarets: rather than the performance, he photographs what happens “before” and “after,” when makeup fades and the persona dissolves. Here again, intimacy is not secrecy but the moment when the image falls away. During the festival’s opening week, Stucin also brought several drag performers to Les Franciscaines for a free evening show that drew an enthusiastic local crowd.
Support and mentorship
The festival continues to emphasize its commitment to emerging artists. The former Tremplin Jeunes Talents has evolved into the Young Photographic Creation Prize, now open to artists aged 18 to 35 and offering a residency at the Villa Pérochon in Niort. The jury is chaired this year by Rima Abdul Malak, former French Minister of Culture, who notes: “This award is much more than a prize — it’s an act of trust in the younger generation, a belief in the new perspectives they can bring us.”
Alongside her sit Philippe Augier (mayor of Deauville), Alain Genestar (Polka Magazine), Anne Lacoste (Institut pour la photographie de Lille), Nicolas Jimenez (Le Monde), Philippe Guionie (Villa Pérochon), Lionel Charrier, and Jonas Tebib — a strong institutional network that reinforces the festival’s credibility. This year’s laureate, Naïma Lecomte, followed the course of the Touques River — from its source through rural landscapes to its mouth between Trouville and Deauville — exploring how water shapes memory, geography, and human presence.
The 16th edition also strengthens its international reach, through the Lebanese residency and long-term partnerships with the Photo4Food Foundation, we are_Paris, and Paris Photo. More than a program, Planches Contact functions as an ecosystem: supporting artists, circulating their work to Paris, and extending the life of the images beyond the festival. This 2025 edition thus stands as a pivotal moment: new leadership, a clearly defined theme, a demand for rigor in production, renewed support for emerging talent, and a unifying message running throughout — that in Deauville, photography is not a backdrop, but a space of hospitality for the intimate.
The Planches Contact Festival runs in Deauville, France until January 4, 2026.
