Edouard Curchod

In the 1980s, Edouard Curchod worked for the local newspaper La Feuille d’Avis de Vevey and, as he was covering general news, political debates and cultural or sports events, he thus became the visual memory of the town. Made well before the advent of social media, his photo-reportages form a huge collection of images and a precious record of the daily life of Vevey residents. His images exhibited on the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville reminded viewers of a not-so-distant past and demonstrated the importance of photography in forging collective history on a regional scale.

When the print shop of the Feuille d’Avis de Vevey was demolished, Edouard Curchod found an 1898 glass plate negative of a view of Saint Martin’s Fair. Convinced that there was a second plate completing the panorama, he searched for the missing piece for twenty years until he finally managed to reconstitute the photographic puzzle by assembling various negatives, prints and postcards held notably at the Vevey History Museum. The view recomposed for the first time for Festival Images was presented on the same square where the Vevey fair has been returning every year since 1470, not far from the spot where the picture was originally taken, thus confronting viewers with the past of the “Town of Images”.