The Centre Pompidou’s “Corps à corps” exhibition combines its famous photographic collection with that of collector Marin Karmitz, to offer, “an unprecedented look at photographic representations of the human figure in the 20th and 21st centuries”.
This major exhibition, featuring over 500 photographs and documents, is divided into seven sections: Early Faces, Automatism, Fulgurances, Fragments, En soi, Interiors and Spectres.
The first section is justified by the fact that “at the beginning of the 20th century, the face in close-up became a recurring motif in the photographic work of the avant-gardes”. As the psychoanalytic exploration of the self-developed, the face – “that which forbids us to kill”, as philosopher Emmanuel Levinas would say – became the object of intimate and aesthetic research, through the use of light and shadow. In the “Automatism” section, the focus is on the hijacking of photomatons (which first appeared in the 1920s), first by Surrealist artists and then, in the 1960s, by numerous activist and protest artists denouncing identity stereotypes. This referent is still relevant today, as many contemporary artists still play, not without humour, with its aesthetic codes: frontality, seriality and the anonymity created by the decontextualisation of the image taken against a neutral background.
REINVENTING FACES
In “Fulgurances”, we see moments of magic caught on the fly – gestures, glances, funny, serious or tender postures stolen from time, speaking volumes about interiority and human relationships… “Photography is the instinct to hunt without the desire to kill. It’s the hunting of angels… You stalk, you aim, you shoot and – clack! instead of a dead body, you make an eternal one”, as one of these visionary photographers, Chris Marker, puts it in 1966.
Dorothea Lange (with her darned stockings of 1934), Jakob Tuggener (with his truncated bodies of sailors in 1947) and Eugène Smith in the late 1960s, for their part, show fragmented bodies, broken up by framing, whether during the shooting or the printing process. While the sensuality of the body is often heightened tenfold in these “fetish images”, they also conceal a definite dramaturgical force that, beyond the eroticised body, tells of desire, toil or pain…
FRAGMENTED BODIES
Douglas Gordon’s Blind Ingrid (White Eyes) (2002) is a veritable allegory of interiority, introducing the section entitled “In oneself”. Ingrid Bergman’s face, statuesque in powerful chiaroscuro, appears unreachable, as do many other faces absorbed in their own thoughts, to which the photographer – and the viewer – remain strangers. The same is true, to a certain extent, of the bodies photographed in enclosed spaces, to which the “Interiors” section is devoted. The same is true of the ghostly bodies in the final section, “Spectres”. Whether through the recording of reflections (Lisette Model, First Reflexion, New York, 1940), the use of blurs, photomontages (Val Telberg, Rebellion Call, 1953) or other solarisation effects, these “ghosts” blur the boundaries of reality traditionally associated with the photographic field, and open up a host of new perspectives…
« Corps à corps. Histoire(s) de la photographie »
“Corps à corps. Histoire(s) de la photographie
Until March 25
Centre Pompidou