Anne Rearick. ImagesSingulières SÈTE #17

French poet and native Sétois Paul Valéry referred to Sète as “L’ile Singulière,” the remarkable island. George Brassens, popular singer/songwriter and poet also drew inspiration from this Mediterranean port city and its inhabitants. New Wave filmmaker Agnès Varda directed her debut film La Pointe Courte in a Sétois fishing neighborhood of the same name.

In 2016, Gloucester photographer Anne Rearick was awarded an artist residency photographing life and culture in Sète. Her five-week sojourn culminated in the publication of her third monograph, Sète 17. Rearick will speak at the Gloucester Writer’s Center about her process, the pictures, and the people (and octopuses) she met along the way.

Born in Idaho in 1960, Anne Rearick‘s humanist vision is documentary in nature, but also uniquely personal. Rearick works on long term projects, photographing over the course of years, and in doing so, deepens relationships and her understanding of people and place.

Rearick received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1990 and has worked as a photographer and teacher for the past 25 years. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, most notably a Guggenheim fellowship to photograph the culture of amateur boxing, the European Mosaique prize to explore rural communities of Italy and Scotland, a Fulbright fellowship to France and two Mass Cultural Council grants.

Three monographs of Rearick’s work have been published: Miresicoletea, on rural life and culture in the French Basque country in 2003, Township, an exploration of post-apartheid South Africa, and Sète 17, a collection of photographs from her artist residency in the French Mediterranean port of the same name. Public collections include the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Centre Nationale de L’Audiovisuel in Luxembourg, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Rearick is distributed internationally by Agence Vu and represented by Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris.