With Vevey Images – the Swiss visual arts biennial – photography becomes a monument

The Vevey Images Biennial of Swiss Visual Arts is once again exploring what has made it such a world-renowned event: the match between the work and the place, between the passer-by, his street and the photograph, displayed in monumental format. It's impossible to miss the gigantic installation of Andreas Gursky's famous Aletsch Glacier photograph. This legendary 1993 work, depicting the largest glacier in the Alps, will be on display in a large format on a building on the Place de la Gare. But exclusively for this edition, Gursky will also be unveiling Aletsch Glacier II, a never-before-seen photograph produced expressly for the Biennial. Thirty-one years after its premiere, this photograph raises questions about the effects of global warming and vividly illustrates our relationship with time, our connection with the past and the future, the central theme of this year's Biennial.

Another monument to photography, Paul Graham, a photographer famous for his street portraits, will be taking centre stage in the streets of Vevey. His outdoor series, shot in New York twenty years earlier, highlights the human figure, eyes closed, turned inward. Also outdoors, the Biennale Images Vevey and Photo Elysée present a monumental installation by photographer Daido Moriyama, a pioneer of street photography and an obsessive lover of Tokyo. The monumental photo features a close-up of a mannequin wearing sunglasses, reflecting urban life and a self-portrait of the photographer.

In all, fifty artists from twenty different countries will be dressing up the streets of Vevey and some of the interiors of buildings, as they plunge into their critical, sensitive or humorous visions of today's society.