Stone the crows! The strangest shots from the Vevey festival - in pictures

Luxury bomb bunkers! Exploding pastries! Visitors to Switzerland’s free open-air photography festival should expect the unexpected ...

Jeff Mermelstein, Sidewalk, 1995

Jeff Mermelstein is a major street photography artist. The images exhibited at Festival Images have been taken from his famous SideWalk series and take us back to the New York of the 1990s. Nesting somewhere between photojournalism and voyeurism, his photography adds humour to the atmosphere of the city and portrays a snapshot of those who are at its very core. Festival Images Vevey is on from 5 to 27 September

Yann Gross & Arguiñe Escandón, Alas, Aya, 2020

Yann Gross and Arguiñe Escandón created their Aya project based on the work of Charles Kroehle, a 19th-century French-German pioneer in ethnographic photography. According to popular legend, he disappeared in the Peruvian Amazon. The Aya series uses both historical and contemporary images, and was created in the heart of the rainforest

Photograph: Yann Gross/Courtesy the artists & Wilde Gallery

Stephen Shore, US 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon, 21 July 1973, Uncommon Places

Stephen Shore is one of the most precocious and prolific photographers of his generation. Shore took colour photographs of the America he discovered on several trips across the US in the 1970s. His Uncommon Places series reveals beauty in the ordinary, and laid foundations for several generations of photographers

Photograph: © Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

Hayahisa Tomiyasu, TTP, 2012-2016

This Japanese artist focused on what was happening on and around a Tischtennisplatte (ping-pong table) just across from his student lodgings. He observed the range of things people did there, far from the primary function of playing table tennis. Tomiyasu spent five years documenting this meeting place, noticing how it was used differently depending on the season, and how it reflected the peculiarities of human behaviour, our social habits, and human ingenuity when it comes to using an object in a totally unexpected way

Annie Wang, Long-Distance Relationship, The Mother as a Creator, 2020

The first image in her ongoing series The Mother as a Creator was taken the day before she gave birth. Every year since then, she takes a picture of herself and her son with the previous year’s photo hanging behind them. This mise en abyme (formal technique of placing a copy of an image within itself) represents the various layers of their relationship and helps construct a new depiction of motherhood

Brodbeck & de Barbuat, Silent World, Place de l’Opéra, Paris, 2009

The Memories of a Silent World series is inspired by Boulevard du Temple, a 1938 photograph by Louis Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype process. This duo return to the long exposure time which proved a familiar constraint in the early days of photography. All moving elements are too fleeting to be captured and disappear in the process. They remove the usual frenzy and add just one human figure digitally to disturb the void. Although this series was compiled in 2010, this year’s lockdowns now make it somewhat prophetic

Stephen Gill, The Pillar, 2015-2019

Stephen Gill’s images defy the confines of wildlife photography. The device created for his The Pillar series is as minimalistic as it is clever. The random movement of birds triggers a stationary camera installed in the Swedish countryside to photograph a wooden pillar on which these birds can perch. The absence of the photographer, the automated process, and the short distance between the camera and the perch provide a very unusual and unpredictable way of capturing birds on film in their natural environment

Juno Calypso, Subterranean Kitchen, What to Do With a Million Years, 2018

In the 1970s, Girard B Henderson had a house built entirely underground in Las Vegas to provide shelter from the potential perils of the cold war. The 1500-square-metre luxury basement included an artificial lawn with a swimming pool and miniature golf course. Juno Calypso was able to stay in this atomic bomb-proof setting to stage her fictional alter-ego, Joyce. Her series of self-portraits blends sensuality, kitsch, glamour, reality and fiction, while alluding to our fantasies of immortality

Photograph: Courtesy Juno Calypso / TJ Boulting

Julian Charrière and Julius von Bismarck - Canyonlands, We Must Ask You to Leave (scenic viewpoint), 2018

The duo stirred up public opinion when they filmed majestic stone arches in a US nature reserve literally exploding. Their video project went viral, and is looped in their multi-screen installation In the Real World, It Doesn’t Happen That Perfectly, which includes comments from outraged internet users. Screens also display official media debating the authenticity of these images. Was it a real act of vandalism or fake news?

Photograph: Courtesy the artists & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany

Gloria Oyarzabal, Pink Girl, Woman Go No’Gree, 2019

Spanish artist Gloria Oyarzabal focuses on a particular ethnic group – the Yoruba people – and notes that there is significant religious and linguistic evidence to prove that their original society was not gendered: prior to colonisation, social practices were ordered according to lineage and age. The project questions how to apply the notions of gender that are specific to western feminism and supposedly universal, to cultures with fundamentally different traditions and ways of functioning

Hans Gissinger, Tartas, 2004

The Tartas project is a collaboration between Swiss photographer Hans Gissinger and Christian Escribà, a famous pastry chef from Barcelona. Hans Gissinger makes a childhood dream come true, by staging jubilant explosions of fancy cakes. These fleeting moments are filmed and caught on camera, resulting in a series of pictures where the confectionery resembles fireworks frozen in mid-air. This performance is both festive and funny, and serves as a reminder to take life a little more light-heartedly

Vincent Jendly, Bering Sea, Lux in Tenebris, 2019

Vincent Jendly almost drowned when he was five years old. Years later, he is still trying to come to terms with water, the element that nearly took his life. His Lux in Tenebris series proposes a deep and intimate immersion in the sea. In 2015, fate led him to his first voyage aboard a Greek cargo ship and into the strange and unfamiliar world of huge maritime freight vessels

Kensuke Koike and Thomas Sauvin, No More, No Less, 2018

This project stems from an album of black and white headshots made by an anonymous Shanghai University photography student in the 1980s. The artists transformed these relics from the past, while abiding by one strict rule: nothing was to be removed and nothing added. The Japanese artist used his scalpel and adhesive tape to slice up, dismantle and rearrange each portrait in a surprising psychedelic collage

Maurice Schobinger, FIN, 2020

Maurice Schobinger was on the patio of La Belle Équipe in Paris in 2015, when the bar became one of the targets in a series of terrorist attacks. He instinctively sought shelter behind a tree on the edge of the pavement. This impulse saved his life. The layers of plant fibres were dense enough to prevent the bullets from reaching him. In light of this experience, Schobinger feels drawn to photographing trees at night. FIN is his deliberation on fleeting moments in time that can change everything

Nadine Schlieper and Robert Pufleb, Alternative Moons, 2017

Robert Pufleb and Nadine Schlieper present a tasty lesson in astronomy. Their Alternative Moons series tests our perception and demonstrates just how easily images can mislead us. The trap is delicious, as when we think we see the Moon’s surface, we are in fact looking at … pancakes. The title of this series alludes to “alternative facts”, an expression coined by the Trump administration