The only way to get through one of these “vallons de ville” is on foot. No car, no bike, no scooter, you have to walk, find the entrance, sneak between the wastelands, the pudding cliffs and follow the creek bed. The exhibition “A deux pas des chiens” presents works from the collaboration of the duo of photographers Favret-Manez with writer and poet Sophie Braganti. They explored separately the “vallons obscurs” of the city , then confronted their work to lead to a creation, where the encounter between photography and text allows to enrich the artistic act in a broader field of complementarity of languages.

This is not the first time that Anne Favret and Patrick Manez have felt the need to associate occasionally with other artists, this was the case for the series Rotterdam (Anonymous Editions, Marseille, 2000) Jean-Christophe Nourisson and more recently for Coast of Wear (2018), a set of pieces co-created with Jean-Philippe Roubaud presented last year in the exhibition FRAC Outside the Walls, Topo-Graphie, at the Museum of Photography in Mougins.

The presence of the text in the photograph brings an outfield, an opening to an exterior to the image. If the gaze on the valleys turns these natural sanctuaries into threatened landscapes, as if collapsing, the words refer us to the jungle of nature and the city. Endangered wild landscapes, presences and traces, spaces of freedom “close to dogs”.

The text is not a counterpoint. There is a fusion between the white cast and the black and white print, intertwining leaves and lights, pebbles and tangled words. Like the rocks of the dark valleys, photography becomes permeable and lets itself be penetrated by the text.

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Exhibition as part of “Des marches, démarches” carried by the Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. This event on the scale of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur territory explores the incredible wealth of travel on a human scale while bringing together many cultural actors of the territory.