{"id":20613,"date":"2014-07-24T23:51:18","date_gmt":"2014-07-25T03:51:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=20613"},"modified":"2014-12-23T11:53:17","modified_gmt":"2014-12-23T16:53:17","slug":"bad-day-in-vevey-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2014\/07\/24\/bad-day-in-vevey-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad Day in Vevey (3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A.<\/a>[As an unexpected\u00a0consequence of my support in mid-2004<\/a> for the founder of the “Formation Professionnelle Sup\u00e9rieure (FPS)”<\/em>\u00a0program at the Centre d\u2019enseignement professionel de Vevey (CEPV)<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0and for the then-current and incoming students who’d signed up for it and then gone on strike when a gaggle of bureaucrats dismantled it without warning, I found myself under attack in the Swiss press from one\u00a0Pierre Keller<\/a>. At the time, Keller\u00a0headed an institution just down the road that competed with the CEPV for recognition and students \u2014 l’Ecole cantonale d\u2019art de Lausanne\u00a0(ECAL)<\/a>, which translates roughly as the\u00a0Lausanne University of Art and Design.<\/em><\/p>\n

Keller and I had never met or spoken, which didn’t prevent him from opining blithely that Radu Stern\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Deputy Director of the CEPV, in charge of its\u00a0School of Applied Arts, which housed the CEPV’s original technical-vocational program and Stern’s creative-photography companion\u00a0thereto \u2014\u00a0had “manipulated” me into support for that program via a “single email.” He did so in the course of a February 19, 2005 interview for the regional newspaper. (Click here<\/a> for that interview, in French.)<\/em><\/p>\n

\"ECAL<\/a><\/p>\n

Keller has made such uninformed, arrogant bluster and mendacity a stock-in-trade.\u00a0According to one of his admirers<\/a>, Michele Laird, “his nomination\u00a0in 1995 to the directorship of ECAL was not well received, so the first thing he did, says Keller, was ‘to get rid of those who got in the way.'”\u00a0Keller is also a member of\u00a0the center-right Radical party, which\u00a0considered running him for office in 2008<\/a>. He turned down their offer, on the grounds that\u00a0“I prefer to give orders, not make laws.” Not a fellow to trifle with, obviously; but then you could say the same about me.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Pierre<\/a>

Pierre Keller<\/p><\/div>\n

Clearly seeing the CEPV program as a threat, Keller colluded with Michel Berney, director of the CEPV; Christian Rossier (on the technical faculty of the CEPV); local entrepreneur Vincent Juillerat; and Anne-Catherine Lyon\u00a0\u2014\u00a0director of the Department of Education, Youth and Culture (DFJC) for the canton of Vaud, which includes both institutions \u2014 to gut it, turning its culminating year into a stint at what Keller\u00a0elects to call “my school.”<\/em><\/p>\n

The new program they conspired\u00a0to force into place at the CEPV collapsed within a year, because the current students walked out and nobody signed up for it. A disaster for all involved except Keller, for whom it represented a win-win; failing to co-opt a competitor he’d destroyed it, and the institution he ran remained intact.<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 A. D. C.]<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

Letter to the Editor of\u00a0La Libert\u00e9\/Le Courrier<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"La<\/a>February 20, 2005
\nTo whom it may concern,<\/p>\n

I have read with much amusement the self-aggrandizing interview<\/a> with Pierre Keller of l’Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne<\/a>. In it, M. Keller has the temerity to propose that my position in regard to the willful destruction of the formerly excellent photography program at the CEPV in Vevey results from my having been manipulated by a single email from Radu Stern, the creator and former director of that program. (Click here<\/a> for a PDF of that article, in French. Click here<\/a> for a French translation of this\u00a0response.)<\/p>\n

\"Pierre<\/a>

Pierre Keller, as quoted in La Libert\u00e9\/Le Courrier (Switzerland), Feb. 19, 2005.<\/p><\/div>\n

M. Keller appears entirely unaware that I am bilingual and Francophone; that I was teaching in Vevey, in that program, last spring, when this crisis erupted; that this was my third teaching stint in the program, so I’d come to know it well; that I attended the formal June 4, 2004 presentation of the new, “improved” version of that program by those responsible for the demolition of the old one; that I read all the documentation thereof that they presented to the school’s faculty and students; that I had the opportunity to speak at length during those weeks with both current and past students of the program; and that I also had the occasion to speak during that time with a number of the other visiting faculty \u2014\u00a0intervenants<\/i>\u00a0\u2014 who, like myself, had taught in the program both that year and previously.<\/p>\n

\"Radu<\/a>

Radu Stern<\/p><\/div>\n

So I arrived at my opinion of the situation not from reading any mythical email from M. Stern, but from direct, first-hand observation and research in Vevey. When I returned home to New York after my seminar concluded, I found waiting for me a letter from the new committee in charge of the CEPV program, outlining the new program and soliciting my opinion thereof. I took that request seriously. Based on my own investigation of the situation in Vevey,\u00a0I made my opinion known to them in a lengthy analysis of the previous version of the program and of the new one<\/a>\u00a0(as they themselves had explained it to us in l’Aula of the CEPV and the accompanying documentation).<\/p>\n

My assessment of the new program was not favorable, to say the least.<\/p>\n

I gather that M. Keller has not taken the trouble to read that letter. If he had, he would surely know that \u2014\u00a0unlike most of my colleagues \u2014\u00a0I did\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0refuse to teach henceforth in the program. As I explained, while I respect the decisions my colleagues made in their exodus from the program, I do not believe in punishing students for the sins of their faculty and administration. So I indicated that, if the new administration wanted me to return, I would consider seriously any such invitation from them, as I do with all such offers.<\/p>\n

\"Vincent<\/a>

Vincent Juillerat, opening, Images’06, Vevey, Switzerland, September 14, 2006.<\/p><\/div>\n

As this may suggest, I am inclined to think for myself, to choose my own course of action, and to take positions regardless of the others around me. The habits of 38 years as an independent journalist, critic, and scholar have become ingrained, for better or worse. Anyone who knows my writing (as M. Keller clearly does not) will confirm that. So the suggestion that I functioned in this situation as some mindless pawn of the supposedly Svengali-esque Radu Stern is, if you’ll pardon my French,\u00a0risible<\/i>.<\/p>\n

And under no circumstances should anyone group me with those former visiting faculty who have refused to continue their affiliation with this program. Demonstrably, I took a different path. If I do not teach again in the CEPV\/ECAL program, it will be specifically because the faculty and administration thereof have not invited me back.<\/p>\n

To enable anyone who so wishes to verify this, and because M. Keller has chosen to denigrate me in print, I have authorized the public posting at this site [the blog set up by the protesting students] of my July 24, 2004 letter<\/a> to Vincent Juillerat and Christian Rossier of the CEPV, referred to above. I have yet to receive the courtesy of a response to that letter. For that reason, and to prevent the use of my involvement with a previous program to promote a new program with which I have no connection, last fall I, along with other former faculty, signed an open letter forbidding the use of our names in publicity<\/a> for the new\u00a0formation<\/i>. (As of the end of August [2004], we were still being used unscrupulously by the school for that purpose.)<\/p>\n

\"Christian<\/a>

Christian Rossier<\/p><\/div>\n

I gather that M. Keller has no intention of asking any of the former\u00a0intervenants<\/i>\u00a0to teach at what he refers to so casually as\u00a0mon \u00e9cole<\/i>\u00a0\u2014 “his” school. (An interesting locution, that. It speaks volumes.) What he and his colleagues at ECAL have to offer photo students in place of extended encounters with Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Sarah Moon, Antonin Kratochvil, Franco Fontana, and several dozen other internationally known figures remains to be seen.<\/p>\n

As a teacher, my commitment is first and foremost to students \u2014\u00a0those who work with me, of course, but students in general. A bad program serves no good purpose, though it may in some ways further the careers and line the pockets of its faculty and administration. So, with all that said, despite M. Keller’s ignorant, arrogant, insulting, and unprofessional comment about my presumed manipulability, and his misrepresentation of me as having refused any future participation in the program, for the sake of its present and future students I wish for nothing but success for the new CEPV\/ECAL initiative.<\/p>\n

Should M. Keller feel compelled to fabricate any further fictions about me, I strongly advise him to do so in a language I don’t understand, to reduce his chances of getting caught at it red-handed. I can read German, and Italian, and Spanish, so he might want to consider Finnish.<\/p>\n

Yours,<\/p>\n

\"ADC<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\/s\/ A. D. Coleman<\/p>\n

(For a brief follow-up interview with me by Micha\u00ebl Rodriguez of La Libert\u00e9 \/ Le Courrier<\/em>\u2014 in French only, alas\u00a0\u2014 click here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

Postscript:\u00a0Unwilling to continue as Deputy Director of a program installed by fiat over his objections, in whose design he had no voice, and with whose pedagogical premises he disagreed fundamentally, Stern accepted the Canton of Vaud’s offer to transfer him laterally to the position of Director of Education at the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Elys\u00e9e<\/a> in Lausanne, with the same salary and benefits.\u00a0I don’t consider it irrelevant that Stern is\u00a0of\u00a0Jewish descent, born in Romania, and thus an outsider according to the mentality of the increasingly xenophobic and anti-Semitic\u00a0small-town Swiss.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Anne-Catherine<\/a>

Anne-Catherine Lyon<\/p><\/div>\n

Rossier, promoted to Dean of Photography\u00a0of the CEPV as a reward for collaborating with Berney, Keller, and Lyon, got removed from that position\u00a0and demoted to its lowest teaching responsibility as the\u00a0consequences of their coup became inescapable. Juillerat moved laterally, co-directing\u00a0a small-scale film and photo festival in Vevey.\u00a0Anne-Catherine Lyon\u00a0lost the lawsuit<\/a> the students brought against her, receiving a judicial reprimand, but remains in place<\/a> as\u00a0director of the\u00a0Department of Education, Youth and Culture (DFJC) for the Swiss canton of Vaud, which includes both Lausanne and Vevey<\/em>, a position to which she was elected in 2002.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 2011 Keller\u00a0reached the mandatory retirement age\u00a0and left\u00a0the directorship of ECAL in order to become president of\u00a0l’Office des vins vaudois (OVV), the ministry of wine for the canton of Vaud. A few months later, Michel Berney retired<\/a>\u00a0as director of the CEPV. In an interview<\/a> shortly thereafter, he said, disingenuously, “I get along very well with Pierre Keller, although at one\u00a0time tensions erupted between the CEPV and the School of Art and Design Lausanne.\u00a0\u2026\u00a0The [CEPV]\u00a0has acquired an international reputation, we feel the weight of the past … I like\u00a0to say, ‘Photography has a first\u00a0name: Vevey.'” (In your dreams, pal.)<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Michel<\/a>

Michel Berney<\/p><\/div>\n

Summing up: On a purely practical, bottom-line level, this gang of five, in cahoots with other accomplices, took\u00a0a program\u00a0that operated in the black \u2014\u00a0as much so as any such program does in Switzerland\u00a0\u2014\u00a0and turned it into a losing proposition, with no clientele, in the space of about 18 months. (Like most such programs in Switzerland, this one\u00a0received substantial cantonal and national subsidies.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Even by Swiss standards, I suspect that’s no mean feat, and not something easy to overlook or explain away with an “Oops!”\u00a0<\/em>But the forces behind the destruction of the CEPV’s “Formation Professionnelle Sup\u00e9rieure (FPS)” have never had to justify in public, on the record, their killing off a program that, among other things, was both financially viable and successful in attracting outstanding students and visiting faculty.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"CEPV<\/a><\/p>\n

The upper-level program in creative photography now offered at the CEPV<\/a> requires two years of rigorous polytechnic-style craft training (at this school, or the equivalent elsewhere) before the student can begin pursuing his or her creative interests within the curriculum. This resembles the model exemplified by the Rochester Institute of Technology circa 1955 \u2014 a peculiarly outmoded vision of post-secondary photo education for the 21st century. And they’ve done away entirely with the capstone of the former Formation Professionnelle Sup\u00e9rieure (FPS)<\/em><\/em>, the final year in which the students would pursue their own thesis projects while reading history, theory, and criticism and engaging with visiting faculty in a dozen short, intensive workshops.<\/em><\/p>\n

That comprised\u00a0a unique pedagogical experiment\u00a0which, in slightly over\u00a0a decade, pumped out remarkable results. Not surprisingly, once the vandals took the handle it became a program that, after a decade, has made no mark whatsoever on the discipline of photo education and the\u00a0field of creative photography.<\/em><\/p>\n

How very Swiss\u00a0of them.<\/em><\/p>\n

(Part 1<\/a> I\u00a02<\/a>\u00a0I 3)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a purely practical, bottom-line level, this gang of five \u2014 Michel Berney, director of the CEPV; Christian Rossier (on the technical faculty of the CEPV)Pierre Keller of ECAL; local entrepreneur Vincent Juillerat; and Anne-Catherine Lyon, director of the cantonal department of education \u2014 took a post-secondary photography program that operated in the black and turned it into a losing proposition, with no clientele, in the space of about 18 months. How very Swiss of them. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1025,15,17,18],"tags":[967,932,934,931,968,929,930,933],"class_list":["post-20613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-archives","category-news-commentary","category-personal-history","category-photo-education","tag-anne-catherine-lyon","tag-centre-denseignment-professionelle-de-vevey-cepv","tag-christian-rossier","tag-lecole-cantonale-dart-de-lausanne-ecal","tag-michel-berney","tag-pierre-keller","tag-radu-stern","tag-vincent-juillerat","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20613\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}