Public :
Senior year students in the CGEA (farm management), LCQ (quality control laboratory) and BIT (bio-industry processing) programs.

Location :
Agri-food and agricultural high school (Yvetot)

Intervention time :
60h of photographic workshop + residence

Artist :
Olivia Gay (Bellême, Orne)

Technique :
Photography

Device :
Jumelages

Partners :
DRAC, DRAAF

Process :
Olivia Gay initiates this project by asking the following questions: How do young people at the high school view agricultural and agri-food work today? What images do they retain of their parents’ work or of the time of the ” elders “? And how do they project themselves into their future profession? To answer these questions, the students of three senior high school classes questioned the image and representation of work and their future professions during the photographic workshops led by the artist.

The CGEA students, future farmers, search for archives (art books, magazines) and also bring back personal images taken from their family albums, before photographing the land of their daily landscapes. They return to the same locations several times to experiment with light, framing and composition.

The students of the BIT and LCQ classes, whose jobs will consist of working in teams and in laboratories, create stagings to represent situations or gestures of daily work, they then choose to photograph the relationship to the living world.

For the past twenty years, Olivia Gay’s work has consisted of photographing women united by a particular skill (lacemakers in Alençon, Calais), a profession (prostitutes, workers, cashiers) or a social status (residents of hostels, prisoners, refugees, asylum seekers), in order to create various dialogues with them. As part of the residency in Yvetot, Olivia Gay’s personal project focused on the high school cleaning staff.

Restitution :
An exhibition gathering the photographs produced by the students and Olivia Gay is presented for two months in the school.