Hyères: The Nominees

Impressionistic landscapes from Dutch artist Kim Boske, handmade montages by French-born Marie Quéau and contemporary still lifes by Russian-Finnish photographer Andrey Bogush populate this year’s Hyères contest, whose international group of nominees are spotlighted in today's slideshow. The ten finalists were selected from a pool of 800 applicants, with the winner to be announced on June 1. “What we look for is people with vision, coming from all fields of photography," says curator Michel Mallard. "We then invite them to stretch that gaze to fashion.” The Hyères festival was originally conceived as a celebration of fashion design, but in 1998 expanded to include photography. The contest is, in essence, a search for the next Guy Bourdin. “At the time [Bourdin] was considered a mere fashion photographer, but if you look at his work today, you realize his genius, what incredible stories he was telling,” Mallard says of the late French icon. “Today, everything is a hybrid, there are no clean categories. For its blurry relation to fashion and contemporary art, photography is an incredible field to experiment in.”