Ambroise Tézenas and Frédéric Delangle

Ambroise Tézenas and Frédéric Delangle

Paris Metropolitan Area, France

Social Integration Through Sports in the City

The Parisian banlieues, areas of social housing on the outskirts of the French capital, have been a source of concern for a long time. Poverty, underachievement in school, unemployment, social exclusion, and drug-related crime are just some of the challenges that young people in these areas face. Confrontations between different religious and ethnic groups are common, and police brutality and disproportional targeting of minorities are a reality. All these issues shape the daily lives of the residents and have a significant impact on the most vulnerable part of the population: children and adolescents.

For the past 20 years, Sport dans la Ville has been France’s leading non-profit organisation serving disadvantaged kids through sports and job readiness training in Parisian suburbs and throughout the country. Young people between the ages of 6 and 25 can join free sports sessions offered by Sport dans la Ville in their area, led and supervised by qualified coaches. The organisation’s programmes promote equal opportunities through social and professional integration and have touched the lives of more than 15,000 young people across the nation.

Ambroise Tezenas

(b. 1972, France) Born in Paris in 1972, Ambroise graduated from the Vevey School of Applied Arts in Switzerland in 1994. First based in London and then Paris, he worked as a photojournalist for both French and international magazines, spending much of his time travelling in South East Asia and Central and South America.

From 2001, Ambroise has essentially devoted his time to landscape photography and started a five-year project witnessing the changes happening in Beijing before it hosted the Olympic Games. In 2006, Ambroise gained international recognition through his first book, Beijing, Theatre of the People, which won the European Publisher’s Award for Photography. Published in seven languages, this project was exhibited at many venues in Europe and Asia, including the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam and the Arles Photography Festival in France. Regularly winning awards, Ambroise won the Nikon Story Teller Award in 2009 for his photographs of Cuba commissioned by the New York Times Magazine, and the Ooshot Award in 2018 among others. Represented by Galerie Mélanie Rio (France), his work is part of the National Library of France collection and the Paris Museum of Modern Art.

He is a photographer and author, and his latest book, I Was Here (Dewi Lewis Publishing 2014), captures though landscape photography people’s increasing interest in visiting places linked to death and destruction. His work features regularly in major international publications, including The New York Times Magazine, AD Magazine and W Magazine.

Frederic Delangle

Born in 1965, Frédéric grew up in the Paris region and graduated from Paris 8 with a master's degree in photography.

He has been passionate about urbanism and landscapes since he started doing photography. In the 90s, he regularly set up his camera on the Parisian ring road to take advantage of this view of the suburbs. It is only natural that he takes on commissions in architecture and urban landscapes for architects, but also institutional and advertising campaigns.

In 2001, he made his first trip to India, which marked a turning point in his work, and embarked on a five-year project on the city of Ahmedabad, at night, to witness the remains of this city, which was one of the richest in India.

What characterises him, even above his photographic work, is his childlike soul, his jubilant quest for play.

Thus, he has also played with Indian codes, with the alleged difficulty for a Westerner to understand this culture, to better grasp it and travel the country for more than 15 years, thanks to his multiple and regular trips, which he called Indian winters. He has also developed his own visual language, imposing constraints on himself, like the Oulipo, of which he willingly recognises a filiation through the game and the protocols.

He plays at scaring himself by immersing himself alone at night in nature with Nyctalope. He plays at colonising Paris by Indians in his Paris-Delhi series. He plays the game of love in Coït. He creates bridges between the old continent and the new world by creating a Third Territory. He makes Indian shopkeepers play their own role in their Microshop. He plays at reorganising the circulation of people and vehicles in Harmonious Chaos.

The only thing he regrets about photography is that he often works alone, without playmates. This is certainly one of the reasons that pushed him to co-create the photographic mission “France(s) territoire liquide”, bringing together 42 other photographers. They worked in the form of a self-produced commission in which the group could also define their own rules of the game.