“During the years I was going, the film festival seemed to become a bigger and bigger deal,” shared Ridgers. “When the porn stars were having their awards show there as well (the Hot D’Or’s ran from 1992-2001), that added a layer of craziness and made for some interesting photographic juxtapositions. The main film festival seemed to take itself awfully serious, and having the porn stars there lightened the mood somewhat.”
Young women then, adult entertainers and wannabe film stars alike, are a constant throughout the new book, posing with friends or performing for the camera; showing off in an attempt to emulate Brigitte Bardot’s culture-shifting debut at the festival in 1953, while promoting “Manina, the Girl in the Bikini.” Ridgers, adopting the gaze of a bystander, recorded it all, from the playful to the outrageous, and sometimes the outright questionable, as in the picture of another photographer taking an upskirting shot. “It seemed shocking then, too, which was why I took the photograph,” he explained. “I was appalled by the unabashed brazenness of it. Someone doing that nowadays would, rightly, get arrested.”
Stressing that he never considered himself above his peers, Ridgers further recalled that he also never felt any sense of kinship with them, and the book concludes with an image of some photographers holding and discussing one of his images, oblivious to his presence. “The whole time I went to the festival, I don’t think I had one conversation with any of the other photographers,” he said. “They shouted at me occasionally, for getting in their way, but that’s hardly a conversation. It sounds terrible, I know, but I just ignored them. I’m competitive and very focused — if I’m standing around chatting, I may be missing a good photograph.”
