No need to specify that Vichy is a city of water when one discovers the fluid and evanescent images of Sandra Rocha. In residence in the spa town, she let herself be carried away by the rural atmosphere of the squares and gardens, she walked along the banks of the river and recomposed the visual poem of young girls in flower along the way. Through her images powdered with light, distant heirs of the classical and idealist paintings of Puvis de Chavannes, she has photographed the eternal summer of young people from Vichy who pick the roses of life on the banks of the river Allier.

This series of photos is on display at the Portrait(s) festival from June 16 to September 10, 2017. Since the 2014 edition, the Portrait(s) festival organized by the city of Vichy welcomes, during one month, a photographer in residence. After Anton Renborg, Cédric Delsaux and Yusuf Sevinçli it is Sandra Rocha, Portuguese photographer, who surveyed the spa town and makes us discover the youth of Vichy.

La vie immédiate takes its source at the confluence of two great rivers: the Marne and the Seine. Sandra Rocha let herself be carried by the current and shared her journey with teenagers who were just awake and aware of the passage of time. Together, they explored their intimate sensations, deep to the unspeakable. This publication appears as their diary, composed of their own texts, collages and photographs that question the paradoxes of age, between the passion to burn one’s life and the passion to build it.

“Sandra Rocha’s book seems to breathe thus, the defeat of seduction results from a crisis of the images that translate from the start the artificial landscapes of the wallpapers. Then opens the world of after, that of the images which speak about the desire without seducing. The women artists have this genius of the interiority, of the fundamental experience to feel an interior body and to be able to express this world. It will be thus question here of liquid, floating and illusion, this book is a nocturnal bath from which resounds the prevented song of the sirens.” Michel Poivert

For 5 years, between 2009 and 2013, Sandra Rocha returned to the island of Terceira, in the Azores archipelago, where she lived until she was 20, to visit and photograph her family. Anticyclone is a study of the island, the effects of the elements and the geography on the daily life of its inhabitants. The invisible high pressure caused by the Azores High causes the air to circulate clockwise. It is present everywhere, in the silences, the cigarettes that light up, the wind that shakes the trees, on the waves…