"Form is content rising to the surface." Drawing strength from this adage by Victor Hugo (from his Philosophical prose) and the highly materialistic turn in contemporary photography "which no longer simply makes matter a motif, but also a means of questioning the medium" 1 The exhibition at the National Library of France highlights, through 250 works from its collections, the photographers' interest in "the flesh of images, their thickness, their texture."
Analog or digital, matte or glossy, grainy, satin or velvety, hybridized or altered… the photographic material here bears witness to “choices that revolutionize the way we see.” Among the most audacious are those of the Japanese photographer Daisuke Yokota (see Acumen no 28) who "revisits his photographic archives and intervenes in them by playing with the accidents of physical and chemical manipulation, fire and water to compose new composite images" 2 »; those of the Italian Lisa Sartorio (see Acumen no 18) which erases, creases, peels off, crumbles… war images found on the Internet to “give them back their substance”; those of Laurent Lafolie (see Acumen no 6) which, with its suspended portrait mobiles, plays with the appearance and disappearance of the image and seeks to escape the fixity of a single point of view; or those of Thibault Brunet (see Acumen no 39) giving photography a three-dimensional form, and Rossella Bellusci, whose light-saturated photographs conjure up evanescent, ghostly silhouettes, reminding us that photography originates from an apparition…
© Payram, Courtesy Galerie Maubert
- Héloïse Conésa, curator of the exhibition, in the preface to the exhibition catalogue.
- Marc Lenot, “Fragility of photography”, in the exhibition catalogue.
"Tests of matter" - Contemporary photography and its metamorphoses
Bibliothèque nationale de France
Quai François-Mauriac, Paris 13e
Until February 4, 2024
France paris
