The Real Stars of Cannes by Johanna Berghorn

Reported by Vogue.

Every May, the cameras at Cannes point the same direction: up the steps, toward the gowns, toward the names. Photographer Johanna Berghorn pointed hers somewhere else. She arrived at the festival last year having just returned to work after having her baby — with fewer bookings than usual, no voice (lost it at dinner on day one), no French to speak of, and nothing but a question typed into Google Translate and held up on her phone like a small, handmade sign.

The question: do the people who actually live in Cannes resent it? A friend had told her the locals supposedly couldn't stand the festival — too loud, too disruptive, too much. Berghorn had more time on her hands than she expected, a documentary instinct she hadn't used in years, and the specific restlessness of someone who needs to shoot something real. So she walked the Croisette and asked everyone except the people everyone else was asking, according to Vogue.

The City Behind the Spectacle

She photographed the street cleaner who didn't want his face shown because he was on the clock, but told her he's proud of his role in the whole thing. She found Jiyan, co-owner of a tiny tailoring shop where celebrity stylists descend during the festival and the team barely sleeps for three weeks — and loves it, pulling up photos of red carpet gowns she'd helped construct. There were women on the beach who set up early and watched the spectacle like it had been staged specifically for them. There was Francesca, who chose that morning for her first swim of the year, dressed for it like the camera was already there, gesturing in full cinema — a former ballerina, Berghorn thinks, though her French couldn't quite keep up. And there was François, the soft serve vendor at his little hut on the Croisette, who sent Berghorn off with a stack of local brochures on day one and an official festival cap on day two. Daily small talk with him became, she wrote, her favorite part of the trip.

Twenty-five people. Every single one of them loved the festival — excited by it, proud of it, woven into it. Not the answer anyone had promised her. The flâneurs drifting the boulevard in carefully planned outfits hoping to be seen. The women who pack a picnic and come to watch every year like it's a ritual. The cook, the lifeguard, the security guard on her break. All of them, somehow, exactly where they wanted to be.

What Berghorn came back with wasn't a takedown of glamour tourism or a romantic myth about salt-of-the-earth locals — it was something quieter and more stubborn than either: proof that a city can hold a circus and still claim it as its own. The most interesting people at any event are almost never the ones with invitations.

Read the original at Vogue.