Bardot by Alec Soth. Courtesy of Yes Future.
Inspired by the success of the Italian fundraising project 100 Fotografi per Bergamo, which raised more than €720,000 for the intensive care unit at Pope John XXIII Hospital to help fight coronavirus, New York’s Pictures for Elmhurst that raised funds for the city’s hardest hit hospitals in Queens, and the UK-based sale Photographs for the Trussell Trust, Yes Future is the French platform rallying the creative community in response to Covid-19.
“Art and fashion, as creative mediums, are bringing their own solutions and ideas to the table,” says the project’s founder Aurélien Arbet of the Parisian fashion label Études. Since 23 April, his fundraising initiative has sold more than 1220 limited-edition prints by a roster of 138 international artists. So far raising €120,000 for the alliance “All United Against Coronavirus,” between Fondation de France, Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris and the Institut Pasteur to support healthcare workers, research projects needed to accelerate treatment and vaccine development, and charities working with the most vulnerable.
Work by acclaimed photographers Alec Soth, Camille Vivier, Jonas Lindstroem, Ari Marcopoulos, Geordie Wood, Ana Kras, Peter Sutherland, Mohamed Bourouissa, Winter Vandenbrink and more, will be signed and sold for €100 in small batches of ten until this Sunday, 10 May. Many of the artists work closely with Études and their publishing house Études Books—the latter’s co-founder Nicolas Poillot has donated an image of two men close together wearing gold chains around their necks.
Left: Camille Vivier, Candle VI. Right: Walter Pfeiffer.
Among those on sale are intimate portraits by Ohio-based artist Carmen Winant, best known for her book My Birth, which collates black-and-white photographs and personal essays on the process of labour, and Turkish-born photographer Olgaç Bozalp, whose portfolio explores ideas about gender, beauty and race. Meanwhile, a shady image of a man with tattooed hands looking bracingly into the camera is served up by documentary photographer Tobias Zielony, who is celebrated for documenting Europe’s fringe communities, antisocial youth culture in Britain and people living amid the threat of violence and tragedy.
Other works seem to reflect the period we are in: images of yellow gloves in the sky by Walter Pfeiffer, and a television playing an old movie in a living room by Alec Soth is a scene familiar during this period of social isolation. Some images depict distress and fatigue too, while many offer a sense of escapism or better times. Jonas Feige and Jonas Lindstroem’s pictures show closeness, people together touching, wistful blue skies and melancholy expressions that offer a sense of calm.
Not only using their creative talents to fundraise for the people most affected by the current state of the world, the photographers featured in this sale also prove that creative collaboration can be done from the confines of their home and not even a global pandemic can stop art from being shared.
See more of the photographs on sale below:
