Sophie Calle
View of the Sea
These photos are taking with people from Istanbul, which is a city surrounded by water, who have never seen the sea in their life. The collection looks into the theme of the negatives of urban life and the mechanicalistic format of our lives. Voir La Mer, dives into people not being able to leave rural areas, due to suppression or money issues. This in turn means that they are not able to see the source for things they see in their everyday lives. These photos also go some way to documenting overpopulation and the the effects of this on the peoples freedom. |
Paul Graham
Beyond Caring
" My aim was ti take the mist well worn tropes of photojournalism and drag them kicking and screaming into the new photographic era, To go to the exhausted heart of the matter and refresh it"
When Graham took the first photographs of Beyond Caring in Bristol in 1984, one in ten people were surviving on benefits. Introduced in the wake of the Second World War for an estimated 600,000 people,the british welfare state was submerged by the mass influx of these cast adrift by MArgaret Thatcher's monetarist policy. For two years, Paul Graham visited over a hundred unemployment offices across the country. Many were makeshift structures, hastily installed in buildings intended for other purposes. These inadequate spaces suggest the supposed inability of the unemployed to adapt to new economic demands. |
The Present |
Paul Graham lifts two moments from this never ending flow; twin images separated by the briefest fraction of time: a scene and its immediate double. The ebb and flow od urban life make a random choreography of time and space. The decisive moment unfolds as we realise that another moment is right behind it. The fascinating unpredictability of "what happens next" in a space dense with trajectories is played out between the images. |
Caught up in their own world, these people are not surprised by the photographer. Rather the photographer seems surprised by what happens to them, by the spontaneous eruption of a fleeting scenario; a possible meaning. Like John Baldessario before him, Paul Graham captures that unlikely moment when three balls thrown into the air become perfectly aligned, The extraordinary within the ordinary. Randomness embraced as perfection |
Cedric Delsaux
Dark Lens
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In the series entitled Dark Lens, familar and disturbing characters from the Star Wars saga are placed in contemporary settings, socialized in the banal surroundings if iur hyper-urbanized environment or against the frim backdrop o deserted post-inustrial landscpaes. They lose their original aura but acquire a kind of strangeness, giving the impression of running on empty and evoking a sense of violence devoid of purpose.
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Whereas Star Wars is a flamboyant epic telling the story of an intergalatic democracy gone bad, Dark Lens creates a contextual shift that resonates like a warning. Delsaux's images provide a compelling evocation of already obsolete dictatorial technological power and provide a glimpse of a fictional but nonetheless possible future: an archeology of the worst-case scenario
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Choi
Pinhole Photographs
After working in the graphic arts while studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Choi turned to photography and worked as a printer at a number of photo labs in Paris. Considered as the mot talented printmaker of his generation, he is not only ban admirable technician but also a uniquely inspired character who works with many major photographers. Since 2005, while continuing to work as a printmaker, he has undertaken his own artistic project first showcased in 2007 at the maison Europeene de la Photographie with a series entitled "Autoportraites aux Enfers" His latest work, is made in a dark room using exposure times lasting several hours, these prints make use of the random creases of crumpled rice paper and carefully applied opaque pigments, and reinvent the age-old art of pinhole photography
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Rodin
The Flesh, The Marble
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The question of the materials employed in art is not simply a matter of technique. A strong symbolic dimension is part of the choice, and so marble takes us back to Antiquity, to the myths of ancient Greece, and to Italy of the Renaissance through the figure of Michelangelo. Marble is also considered to be the material that most resembles the flesh; hard and cold, it must become warm and supple as it is transmuted beneath the artist’s chisel, demonstrating through the process both the artist’s virtuosity and his capacity to transform matter. Rodin is above all a modeller, like most of his contemporaries, and, from the beginning of his career, he called upon the service of practitioners. Nonetheless, his «style» is easy to identify in his sculptures, particularly his use of the non finito, which constitutes a virtual trademark, often imitated by other artists. Moreover, he was working in an era when «practice» was increasingly abandoned in favour of direct carving, or taille direct. Long disregarded by critics for historical and aesthetic reasons, marble sculpture nonetheless constitutes a very important part of Rodin’s art that it seemed pertinent to examine anew in this exhibition. The artist had a special relationship with this matter of marble, and his contemporaries saw him as a “dominator of stone” before whom “marble trembled”. Contrary to common assumption, his marble sculptures, far from being conventional, give life and form to the modern soul, “this dislocated, brutal and delicate psyche, spirited and weary, fervent and yet tending towards the negative”. Not content merely to call upon his sense of plastic synthesis, the sculptor is adept at bring life to a classical material that is, a priori, given to immobility.
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