

Sténopé is also an associative gallery, which wants to be a place of exchange and artistic discoveries. The Sténopé gallery not only hosts the NICEPHORE PLUS Biennial, or the STÉNOPÉDIES, but also proposes throughout the year :
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exhibitions
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workshops on image education.
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portfolio readings.
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workshops for all levels.
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guided tours of the exhibitions and their scenography.
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discussions on photographic writing.
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presentations followed by book signings.
To find out more about the "Inside The Scenes" exhibition : HERE


Purveyors of photos perhaps, certainly not apostles and definitely not saints, the members of the Sténopé team are all believers in this festival and were guided towards the light by the photographer Marielsa Niels, to set the tone of the 15th Nicéphore+ Biennale and mark in the same breath the 20th anniversary of the Sténopé association.
Marielsa Niels is represented by the Vrais Rêves gallery and is distributed by the Hans Lucas studio.
.©Marielsa Niels / Hans Lucas
our history
Created at the dawn of the new millenium, the subject of the first Nicéphore + festival was the perception of reality and our relationship with images, given how much they had changed since the birth of photography some 160 years earlier, and to open the debate on these developments, driven by the emergence of new technologies that tend to influence the ways and also the capacities we have to perceive them.
Thus in the autumn of 2000, the Nicéphore + international photographic festival of Clermont-Ferrand was held for the first time. An ambitious event for the newly created association behind it, whose deliberate goal was to provide the opportunity to discover major exhibitions and meet renowned photographers within the region, developing multiple aspects of a pre-defined theme that would evolve with each edition of the festival.
This resulted in Clermont-Ferrand hosting some of the leading names from all fields of all photography: traditional, resolutely contemporary, plastic arts, social or journalism...