Claude Baechtold

Switzerland (1972)
Grand Prix Images Vevey
2006
Pôle Nord

Laureate of the Grand Prix Images Vevey 2005/2006, Claude Baechtold traveled to the North Pole to make a quirky documentary to offset the usual clichés related to this remote and poorly known territory. With its cabins, sea ice, seals, endless nights and midnight sun, the Arctic has always inspired a fantasy imagery that draws as much from the great explorers as from the cartoon Petzi. With an installation in Espace Images that borrowed the artistic codes of the photo-novel, the photographer reinterpreted his snapshots taken eight years previously in Siorapaluk, the most northern village on the planet.

Biennale Images Vevey
2012
À la poursuite de Diamond Jo

Premiering internationally at Festival Images, À la poursuite de Diamond Jo is the first film by Le Cowboy Noir aka “the director who shoots faster than his own shadow”. The movie tells the crazy adventure of a diamond robbery in Lagos, Nigeria. Co-produced by Images Vevey, the feature film was shot in two weeks in Nollywood, second to India as the world’s largest film industry in terms of the number of films produced. The whimsical production was in fact directed by a collective led by Swiss photographer Claude Baechtold, that favors alternatives to a movie industry too often suffocating from time and budget constraints.

 

Biennale Images Vevey
2014
Size Matters

For the 2014 edition of Festival Images, Claude Baechtold conceived a series of five short films based on the slogan Size Matters, introducing a stuffed pheasant, a forty-year-old female elephant or a family of snails. With the aim of raising awareness of the event on social media, each of these 50-second short films offered a quirky and ironic gaze on the monumentality of installations, now a typical feature of the Festival.

Espace Images Vevey
2014
Pôle Nord

Laureate of the Grand Prix Images Vevey 2005/2006, Claude Baechtold traveled to the North Pole to make a quirky documentary to offset the usual clichés related to this remote and poorly known territory. With its cabins, sea ice, seals, endless nights and midnight sun, the Arctic has always inspired a fantasy imagery that draws as much from the great explorers as from the cartoon Petzi. With an installation in Espace Images that borrowed the artistic codes of the photo-novel, the photographer reinterpreted his snapshots taken eight years previously in Siorapaluk, the most northern village on the planet.