Eden Sète 11

Giving a carte blanche is always risky. That of inviting Juan Manuel Castro Prieto as an artist in residence for the fourth edition of the ImageSingulières collection was negligible considering just how different a reputation he has. And the results certainly live up to our expectations – each year we seek to produce an original book with a difference. Yet Castro Prieto, working with traditional techniques, colour and a 20×25 large format camera, certainly didn’t opt for the easy way out. He tells us about memory. Each of his pictures is like a piece from an impressionist puzzle: a detail, a local character, a memory captured with the accent… The pastel images that he offers us up, in apparent pain yet with astonishing good-nature and kindness, come together without a single wrong note yielding a poetic image of the town. But make no mistake, Juan Manuel questions his own past as well as that of Sète.

Christian Caujolle