FRANCE – PARIS
THE ETERNAL FEMININE
A foggy window, an umbrella hanging from a cracked wall, a basin of wet laundry, a little girl asleep on a bench… all simplicity and strangeness, Claude Batho’s photographs express the poetry of everyday life, that of common objects and household chores.
Enhanced by black and white, individualised by tight framing and theatricalised by the use of light – light of the purest purity – these objects are almost allegories. The mirror reflecting the father’s face, blinded by the light coming in through the window, evokes absence, as does the misty window (reminiscent of the work of Czech photographer Joseph Sudek 1) – which can also evoke oblivion or reverie. The photograph of the little girl standing in a corridor doorway, surrounded by broomsticks, is disturbing in more ways than one, and recalls Dutch interiors painted in the Golden Age, while the wet torso wrapped in Le Rideau de douche photographed in 1981 inevitably evokes Erwin Blumenfeld’s famous Nu sous la soie mouillée (1937).
ALLEGORIES
All simplicity, but also all modesty and gentleness, Claude Batho’s photographs also have something of the memento mori about them, evoking a certain melancholy. “These photographs […] are filled with the passing of time, on children, people and things. I wanted to make very simple moments sensitive, to retain their silences…” said the photographer who published Le Moment des choses in 1977.
As for Erica Lennard, she concentrated on portraits of women (her sister Elisabeth, friends and women she met and admired) from the age of twenty, during the 1970-1980 period. Her photographs are equally poetic and elegant, revealing the same sharpness and gentleness of gaze. An enveloping gaze that, with sensuality and modesty, reveals silhouettes and faces in the light.
Photographed in romantic settings that foreshadowed the garden photographs Erica Lennard would become famous for, these women are not photographed as “objects of desire” but as living, luminous, mysterious and radiant beings… A beautiful ode to women… by women.
- 1896-1976
CLAUDE BATHO & ERICA LENNARD – Women’s Lives
Until September 23rd
La Galerie Rouge
3, rue du Pont Louis-Philippe, Paris IV
STÉPHANIE DULOUT