Basile Pelletier, Prix de la Photographie American Vintage 2024 : “Un temps pour vivre”

« 我們是不是只能知道一半的事情啊 ? » — “Can we only know half the truth?” asks Yang-Yang in Edward Yang’s film Yi Yi. The child photographs the backs of his loved ones so that they can see what they themselves never see. This childish, poetic gesture inspires Basile Pelletier’s photographic work. He draws on it for the idea of a fragile half-truth as an aesthetic and critical terrain.
The title of the series, borrowed from Hou Hsiao-Hisen’s film, A Time to Live, a Time to Die, retains only the first half. This omission is not an oversight, but intentional: to emphasise this inherent incompleteness. As a Frenchman in Taiwan, Basile shapes his perspective from a position of strangeness; he can never claim to know the whole truth about the other, but in this lack, he creates, in fragments, a space of openness. His series explores what surfaces, what escapes, between reality and fiction. And if the title retains “A Time to Live”, it is also because it is a reflection on youth.
Produced during a six-month university stay in Taiwan to prepare a thesis entitled Growing Up in New Taiwanese Cinema, the series draws directly on this immersion. It offers us photography without actors, but not without staging. The models—friends and acquaintances—are not mere extras. They modestly embody the tension between lived experience and staging.
Some documentary images sit alongside constructed scenes, displayed together as if they belonged to the same narrative. In each one, wandering and waiting take shape.
Presented as a nod to the fashion industry —whose codes it subverts— Un temps pour vivre questions our relationship with the gaze: what does it mean to see, to represent? The exhibition does not aim to tell a complete story, but rather to capture a state, a threshold: that of youth suspended between childhood and adulthood.