BERNARD FAUCON

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL DAY OF MY YOUTH

From 1997 to 2003, I organised one-day celebrations in twenty-five sites around the world. Each time, a hundred young persons were invited. Each of them was given a disposable camera.

Using the thousands of photographs taken on these occasions, I invented Le plus beau jour de ma jeunesse (The Most Beautiful Day of My Youth).

From Morocco to Japan, from Burma to Cuba, from Cambodia to Sweden… it seemed to me that this image of youth in the world resembled the festive and playful atmosphere, the happiness regained, of my first staged photographs taken twenty years ago.

Here is how each celebration unfolded:

I convinced the organisers that this was not a photo studio, but a gratuitous and Proustian experience of time, photography and happiness.

Being neither vast nor narrow, the sites were chosen because they were both typical of the country and at the same time rather surprising for the young persons.

I requested that the 80 to 100 participants – ranging from 15 to 20 years old – be not of the same social and cultural background. I wrote them a letter, which was then translated into their own language.

I met these young persons to tell them about the project. I asked them to choose an object that they would bring on the day of the celebration. I insisted that the project was not about the place itself, but about them and what they liked.

On a given morning, we would ride the bus or a boat… we each had our disposable camera with us (except for the last two celebrations, shot with digital cameras). I didn’t supervise the shots.

My assistant Antonin and I would run from one group to the other, handing out surprises: smoke grenades, gold paper, Bengal lights, drinks…

For 2 to 3 days after the celebration, we would see to the selection of the photographs, to their printing and to the arrangement of the exhibition.

Then came the time of the opening and the miracle of a true exhibition happened repeatedly. Indeed, we were invariably full of doubts before completing the selection: « what if it doesn’t work this time … ». In the end, the last celebration confirmed it all: choosing a unity of place, time and age, selecting 60 pictures out of 2 to 3000, infallibly leads to success. The participants were also amazed: these indeed were the photos they had taken, but this was going well beyond their imagination. Their sense of freedom had formed with our sense of freedom in the selection.

But this is not all. When one arbitrarily decides on a definite moment in time, when one first devotes it to happiness, and then reconstructs it in the staging of an exhibition, one’s wish comes true: the moment becomes exceptional. During the openings, I kept hearing: “Sir, it truly is the most beautiful day of my youth!”

In 20 or in 50 years, a number of them will probably remember Le Plus beau jour de ma jeunesse and will refer to it with solemnity.

MEMORIES OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL DAYS
By Antonin Potoski

I didn’t travel with Bernard Faucon to Morocco, Japan, Brazil and Lebanon. I joined The Most Beautiful Day in progress, after the objects, the Moroccan abstractions, the graphic design and solitude of the Japanese, the scorching sensuality of the Brazilians and the Mediterranean theatricality of the Lebanese.

Paris, Parc de La Villette. It was a rainy, overcast day. The young people had spread out to the furthest corners of the park, and gathered around surprises we had prepared for them including a big afternoon snack that included 26 treats forming the 26 letters of the alphabet and which participants could eat depending on their names… We had thrown a hundred kilos of dry ice into a pool in the park which, with the difference of temperature, made the water bubble like a witch’s cauldron for twenty minutes, blanketing its surface with a stagnant cloud of smoke. In all the countries we visited, this day belonged to youth, they’re the ones who create it, who plan it around their ideas and their freedom. The surprises we prepared added a little wonder, but what really mattered was the way young people made it their own, and how this day would stand apart in their lives. A young Parisian boy said to me after one surprise, and I will always remember it by contrast with the enthusiasm of young people around the world: Right, so what’s next?

Turkey. A cold and sunny December day in an Istanbul neighborhood facing Asia, on the other side of the Bosporus. We had taken over the big terrace of a café on the water’s edge, which would have been swarming with tourists and street vendors in mid-summer. We warmed ourselves with tea, cardamom coffee and a thick drink made with cinnamon. The young people knew the neighborhood well, they set off looking for good places to stage their photo ideas. Paradoxically, after that long winter’s day, nightfall brought a little comfort and even heat with it, maybe because the wind that blew off the straits had died down, or maybe because we had lit colored torches and danced around the lights.
The Most Beautiful Day only lasts one day, but by nightfall when we parted ways until the exhibition three or four days later, we felt we had spent a lifetime together.

Myanmar. Fifty French students from Rangoon arrived by bus to Bagan, the former capital of the Burmese empire, built between the 11th and 13th centuries. The city now consists of three thousand pagodas and stupas in a valley buttressed on one end by a small mountain chain and on the other by a river. For the Buddhist students, it was a pilgrimage but the meeting with Bernard and celebration were its high points. We had scouted three locations: a ruined temple whose terrace we could climb on top of, a monastery by a river for lunch and the warmest part of the day, and a massive temple for the late afternoon and nightfall. The thousands of pointed stupas as far as the eye could see, the dozens of little tables set up at the water’s edge in the shadow of the monastery, the river’s sandy beaches, the dark halls of the temples we were alone in – it all formed a dreamscape that surpassed even the ambitions of that day. In the morning when I distributed the cameras, a young Burmese boy said to me in all seriousness, because it was true: Sir, this is the most beautiful day of my youth… And I thought of what the little Parisian had said.

Thailand. In Bangkok, the Chao Phraya river is the only place where you can breathe a little fresh air, where you’re not asphyxiated by exhaust fumes, the only breathable place. We had chartered a boat and sailed past the whole modern city with a hundred Thais, most of whom had never been on the river, past the skyscrapers to the countryside and the mouth of the river, where the day had unfolded around a Buddhist temple. It’s the epitome of rural Thailand with a primary school and ball field adjacent to the temple, and little wooden houses among the banana plantations. Bangkok’s youth spend their free time in these giant shopping centers. They live and dress like the music videos they spend their time watching. As though acting in one, they started snapping pictures with their disposable cameras off the boat. Whereas in other countries the disposables last until the evening, the Thais emptied theirs in two hours. But they didn’t lose their enthusiasm, they spent the afternoon playing soccer, preparing surprises with us, eating, playing music, and singing on the deck of the boat back to Bangkok in the twilight.

Cuba. Very official trip two hours from Havana, through lovely countryside full of tobacco fields, past a farm, and a little mountain where there were colorful meadows, a dark and dense banana plantation, and a cave to take refuge in case of a storm. We were accompanied by a team from the Havana Contemporary Art museum, by representatives from the Ministry of Culture, Communist youth and the national television station. But despite their presence, the local culture agency, who felt they hadn’t been consulted or flattered enough by the Havana authorities, forbid use of the location the young people had occupied. They forced us to spend the afternoon in the parking lot of a tourist trap, the ugliest spot on the island, with a hideous painting of dinosaurs on a cliff! The official representatives that accompanied us and the young people were furious, but nobody argued. If the situation was so hopeless, it was precisely because their socialist education had triumphed: the young people kept their indignation to themselves, but they were beautifully intelligent, self-aware and enthusiastic.

Cambodia. We spent the day in Angkor Tom, the old city of Angkor overrun by jungle, with French-speaking students from Siem Reap and orphans who are cared for and educated in a pagoda surrounded by forest and run by Buddhist monks and volunteers. The sky was heavy and ready to burst. Though it didn’t rain, it was so humid we were drenched anyway. The rain fell after a fairytale lunch: in a jungle clearing we set up dozens of round tables with white tablecloths and served a festive meal to the participants and all the orphans, including a table of little girls who would have eaten themselves sick if the torrential rain hadn’t interrupted them. After the downpour, we went back outside to the lichen-covered stone maze where the snakelike roots of trees simultaneously destroy the monuments and prevent them from falling down and where the young monks look like apparitions behind the colorful smoke bombs.

Sweden. First a tram, then a ferry across the inhabited part of an island in the archipelago off the coast of Gothenburg and to its wild western coastline where we found mini fjords of very blue water, flowering grasses, very pure light, and a breathtaking sunset. In the middle of August, you could already feel winter eager to reclaim its place after the still-gentle temperatures of summer. A group of impassioned girls stayed with us until late into the night. The never-ending twilight on the deck of the last ferry, the very last twilight of summer. In all the countries, except Mali and Indonesia, girls were in the majority and were, I think, the most moved by meeting Bernard. They always signed up in greater numbers than the boys, and were more invested: it was surely they who had spent their most beautiful days. At the opening of the exhibit in Gothenburg, the young Swedes read us a speech that didn’t just express their pleasure at seeing their images as art, as they did in other countries, but also showed they understood and approved of the work we put into turning their day into an exhibition.

Germany. We spent the whole day under a cold, driving rain. The young people were admirable: always enthusiastic, they never stopped snapping photos. Often, if not at every new stage, we feared that nothing would happen: It has worked till then, but what if it doesn’t next time? The young people we saw the most were those who hung around us because they didn’t have ideas to carry them away, and out of a hundred young people there are always a few who lack imagination. When we selected images on our hotel room beds, or on the carpet with our friend Jérôme, the director of the French institute in Heidelberg, between the bells of three baroque churches that surrounded his apartment, the young people who surprised and reassured us were those who had plunged into the woods skirting “the philosophers path” parallel to Neckar, the river that flows through the city. In all the countries, the most active young people are those you don’t see, who go wherever their ideas lead them.

Apt. We had little faith in the young people of Apt: after the Paris experience we harbored a prejudice against the French. The day began with the same issues of authority we had met in Paris and nowhere else, the problem of French adults not having authority over young people. The French monitors couldn’t enroll their students by simply saying come on this day, at this time. In France, we like to think that young people are responsible enough to sign themselves up, and moreover to respect this enrollment. In Apt, like in Paris, the number of young people who showed up the day of the party was closer to fifty than a hundred. But the Aptesians ended up being clever, kind and tender, and it reconciled us with France. They experienced this day for what it was – a chance to participate in and be part of an artwork – and they were touched by Bernard’s returning home to the high school where he had been a student. They didn’t stop photographing the Provencal autumn, which is more austere than in the summer, until nightfall. Among them, a young Swede who spent a year in their high school recognized one of his best friends in the Plus beau jour images from Gothenburg.

Mali. Not much invention or staging, but rather variations of pauses, the only photography Malians experience during wedding parties, baptisms, independence day, or religious festivals. Within the walls of the pretty school in Lassa, a Bamako neighborhood separated from the center by the outcropping of a hill, we brought together students from this school and young soldiers from a military academy in Kati, near Bamako. The day spent in the village and on the hill looking out over the capital and valley of Nigeria. At each vernissage we would give the young people envelopes containing their prints. The students from the military school had already experienced photography, but the students from Lassa, from a more modest background, were moved to receive their own photos for the first time in their lives. The boys, after a moment of shyness, not knowing what to do with this envelope in their hands, started comparing photos. Meanwhile the girls, magnificently dressed and made up for a day of celebration, laid their photos out on the ground, mixed them up, nudged them with their fingers and commented on them, putting them into moving piles of images which they gathered around in little groups.

Sicily. Here, they take pleasure in talking, it’s not just a myth. You sense that it makes Italians feel good to speak their language, to exaggerate it. The roll call in the bus was repeated in chorus by all the students: a real song. All day long, on the immense Greek site of Selinunte, in the middle of antique temples, the young people spoke to each other on their mobile phones. We drew them a map indicating the various rendezvous points of the day, the surprises and the lunch. When at lunchtime we didn’t see them arrive, we wondered if they’d find the place on the map, but the early arrivals immediately phoned the others. It was a splendid day, the weather was radiant and still warm in December by the blue Mediterranean, on the southernmost tip of Europe. Without us planning it, the temples, the comedy of youth, the sun and the sea, the shirtless boys in jeans, their mobile phone ringtones that play last summer’s hit and even the torches and smoke bombs, produced a wholly Italian ambiance, a mixture of showiness, religious baubles, vacation and peplum.

Indonesia. We held the Most Beautiful Day under sulfurous rain in a giant volcanic crater eleven kilometers in diameter, covered with black sand, at 2,300 meters altitude. Right on the edge of the crater, drops of rain stung your eyes and it was hard to breathe. The sulfur steam didn’t come from the chasm in a regular way like factory smoke, but intermittently, as though the earth was breathing. No sooner had they arrived than the young people spread out and started snapping photos like little splashes of color among the clouds hugging the black dunes, and creating sudden alterations between rain and sun. We were in Java, island of conquerors, colonial occupier of the other islands, just after the conflict of Timor and the Maluku. The day was marked by a mixture of conquering attitudes, pennants and swords, and the revolution of a youth that felt, with the end of the dictatorship, that its day had come.

Taiwan. The day was spent in a garden in Puli, a midsized city in the center of the island, at 200 km from Taipei, which is located at the epicenter of the June 1999 earthquake. It rained heavily all day long without letting up. It rains eight months a year in Taiwan. The party turned into a big ballet of multicolor umbrellas, the young people had forgotten the rain, removing their shoes to play barefoot on the shiny tar path or in a pool of water. One night in June, all these young people had been awoken by the earthquake that struck Taipei. By the time the tremor was over all of them had lost at least one loved one, and it was troubling how little you could tell watching them play in the rain. Because the exhibit was in Puli, the martyr village, it was graced by a visit from the Minister of Education and Television who followed the young people into their school where a big white rectangle remained in the lawn where a building had once stood.

Syria. An excellent paved road led us into the middle of the desert not far from Damascus, and we stopped suddenly in the middle of a multitude of old sagging volcanoes. After a big tar platform built to turn the car around, there was nothing but a vague rocky track as far as the eye could see, to Iraq. The young people were crazed. 300 wanted to sign up, a group of those who hadn’t gotten in even rented a bus to follow us and participate by force, but the high school principal intimidated the bus driver and they ended up not coming to climb the volcanoes with us. We asked for the buses to disappear and only to reappear when night had started to fall over the desert to make it look as though they had abandoned us. So only in the middle of the stones and the dark craters of the volcanoes did the young people start shouting the most beautiful day of my youth, the most beautiful day of my youth, until they were hoarse, launching a hundred blue luminescent tubes into the sky which traced arcs of light like a hundred comets, all the while singing and dancing to the rhythm of a drum that they had brought. And even more beautiful, the day of the show, they shouted it until it shook the walls of the high school where the exhibit took place.

Russia. TVs, radios, interviews, all day long in the big Gorky park in the heart of Moscow on the banks of the Moskva, across from the powerful and giant Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Once again, we feared the result because the participants struck us as too young: many were still children. But the result proved how wrong we were: we succeeded in exhibiting no less than 120 surprisingly modern images at the Moscow Photo Month. In the verticality of their images and their impeccable compositions, it was as if the young Russians had applied old constructivist lessons to the year 2000.
The Most Beautiful Day of My Youth ended in the east of our continent, more exotic for us than Asia and Africa, because the differences are closer to home and seem stranger. The Aeroflot plane that brought us back to France took off very vertically, because the Russian pilots trained on fighter planes and have kept the habit of assertive takeoffs. We had the impression we were leaving the earth for the stars, leaving behind a happy youth in all the countries we had visited.

Translation by David Pickering