calendario eventi  :: 

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26/6/2012

Five exhibitions

Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris

Alice Springs

Curator: Matthias Harder

In 1970, June Newton began a career as a photographer using the pseudonym Alice Springs. Since 2005, her work has been regularly exhibited in “June's Room” at the Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin. This retrospective, previously shown in Berlin and Milan, reflects 40 years of work and includes advertising photographs, fashion photographs, nudes and portraits.

Alice Springs began her own photographic career in Paris in 1970. Her husband, Helmut Newton, who was in bed with flu, taught her how to use his camera and light meter so that she could stand in for him on a photo shoot for Gitanes cigarettes. The famous portrait she took that day was the springboard for her new career.

A stage actress born in Australia, she had to abandon her career when she moved to Paris and began to paint using the brushes and paints her huisband gave her. But after that famous advertising portrait, José Alvarez, who was running an ad agency at the time, commissioned her to work on some ads for a pharmaceuticals company.

From the mid 1970s, Alice Springs received many commissions for portraits, some of which have become legendary. The many artists, actors and musicians she has photographed over the past 40 years form a “Who's Who ?” of the international cultural scene on both sides of the Atlantic - from Yves Saint-Laurent to Karl Lagerfeld, from Billy Wilder to Diana Vreeland… not forgetting the Hell's Angels. Most of her portraits have been commissioned by magazines published in Paris and Los Angeles, but some are her own private initiatives.

Most of her models belong to the international jet-set, but Alice Springs looks at them all with the same innocence and simplicity. She reveals their unique character, but also their vulnerability.

Her portraits stand out because of their intimate, spontaneous approach. Expressing the intensity of such artistic personalities can only be done thanks to an open mind, great sensitivity and psychological insight. We can imagine these celebrities doing photo shoots as part of a constant quest for fame ; but in fact, a photo session can become a kind of duel between model and photographer, with the camera serving as a weapon. In a photographic portrait, creative force comes second; the photographer has to go beyond simply recording a moment and create a new, unexpected image that is able to transgress stereotypes. Alice Springs achieves this many times in her portraits. It is perhaps her knowledge of theatre that makes her see beyond the human being, in particular in her double portraits that subtly highlight the way the two subjects interact.

Alice Springs does more than capture what her famous or anonymous contemporaries look like; she channels their charisma and their aura. Behind these magnificent portraits lies a complex rapport with the model: a spiritual bond. Her eye focuses on the face; sometimes she narrows the field to home in on a detail, usually the hands. In her small format prints, the subject looks at us directly, with curiosity and frankness - something rare in contemporary photography. Few of her portraits are made in a studio; most are taken in public places or at the home of the sitter. Ther's an atmosphere of familiarity, halfway between distance and intimacy. Poses are rarely affected; the shots are done with great simplicity. The photographer never betrays her subject.

In the early 1970s, Alice Springs was commissioned to do several ad campaigns for the hairdresser Jean-Louis David; her photographs appeared in her own name, in full page ads published by major fashion magazines such as Elle, Vogue, Marie Claire and Nova. She also began to work for the magazine Dépêche Mode in 1971 and, three years later, did the cover for the French edition of Elle. Some of her early fashion and publicity work are presented at the beginning of this retrospective, which also includes the provocative nudes she produced in the 1970s.

Catalogue: “Alice Springs Photographs”, Published by Taschen.

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27 June - 26 August 2012

Paul Thorel
Un-Vrai-Semblable

Curator: Jean-Luc Soret

Paul Thorel's enigmatic photographs bear the marks of one of the most influential technological innovations of the twentieth century: television. But to be more precise, the artist's eye has been attracted by the blurred images, 'snowstorms' and accidential distorsions caused by poor reception on the family TV set. This relationship with distorted images made him one of the first European artists to explore digital technology in the field of photography in the earky 1980s.

His works have another key component: the human figure. Whether a face or a body, the human presence seems to inhabit even his most seemingly abstract compositions. We have to imagine that behind each pared-down, minimalistic landscape there is the shimmering expression of a portrait; to suspect that abstract botanical compositions contain an arrangement of several faces ; to decipher the fossil image of far-off stars so that suddenly the outline of a crowd of praying men appears. To make the apparition easier to see, it is often necessary to step back from the image; now the face or outline emerges whereas from close up it was impossoible to see. The shimmering outlines and the alternation between proximity and distance, shadow and light, figurative and abstract mean that the roving eye of the viewer is never allowed to rest. The photographic image, halfway between emergence and dissolution, seems to act as a mantra, lulling our gaze into a kind of visual stasis or rhythmic loop made of repetitions and variations and creating the necessary conditions for a true state of meditation.

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27 June – 26 August 2012

Charlotte Rampling
Secret Albums

The personality of Charlotte Rampling is forever shrouded in the mystery reflected in her strangely enigmatic gaze. After having left her unique mark on the cinema, the stage, and music, she now reveals her unique relationship with the world of photography.

For the part of the exhibition centered on her private life, Charlotte Rampling turns the pages of an album focusing on early childhood and adolescence, a kind of hymn to life that also shows her love of travel, particularly in the Far East, long before China became a popular destination.

Secondly, photographs featuring Charlotte Rampling herself are being exhibited together for the first time. They are by great phototographers including Cecil Beaton, Bettina Rheims, Helmut Newton, Alice Springs, Paolo Roversi, Peter Lindbergh, and Pierre et Gilles. All of them contain an element of surprise - or even of shock (in the case of Juergen Teller).

Lastly there is a series of self-portraits by photographers Charlotte Rampling has chosen from the Maison Européenne de la Photographie collection (Larry Clark, Ralph Gibson, Marie-Laure de Decker, Duane Michals, etc).

The original soundtrack for the sound installation was composed specially by Jean Michel Jarre.

Henry Chapier

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27 June - 26 August 2012

Anderson & Low
Manga Dreams

The Maison Européenne de la Photographie presents Manga Dreams, an exhibition of the work of English and Sino-Malaysian duo Anderson and Low. It features a selection of about twenty prints and a video.
“Manga Dreams” is an original art project that references Japanese cartoons and the art of portraiture, and whose aesthetic invites several different levels of interpretation. The subjects draw inspiration from mangas to create their look, giving themselves over-the-top hairstyles and putting on elaborate costumes before posing in front of the camera.

The word manga was used by Hokusai to refer to humourous drawings, but the contemporary definition of the word refers to cartoons. In this exhibition, the manga illustrates the link between forms of urban expression, visual cyberculture , and contemporary art. If we think about the influence of street culture on modern art, we can see how “Manga Dreams” fits into this artistic filiation.

During a trip to Asia, the photographers were struck by how radically Japanese youth had changed. Shopping malls have become epicentres where a new cultural phenomenon takes place: young people creating a style inspired by mangas and animated characters. Manga-inspired clothes, hairstyles and movements take them into a parallel world far from reality. Anderson & Low decided to make a series of pictures focusing on this phenomenon.
They established a dialogue with their subjects and recreated their new identoties in the studio: each person looks ordinary at the start, but little by little becomes an emblematic character from the fantasy world of manga.

Anderson & Low use digital technology to create an ambiguous world and give their images the power to alter our perception of reality. Underlying this project is a recurrent theme in their work: that of identity and appearance.

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27 June - 26 August 2012

Jérémie Nassif
Envols

This exhibition presents a selection of photographs that are the result of three years of work and encounters in the world of dance.

Jérémie Nassif makes no secret of his long-standing fascination for painting: he spent a long time studying « how it is done ». But his work seems to me to be philosophical as well as formal. The word 'philosophy'probably has a broader meaning than my own definition, namely 'the study of beings'. How do they appear ? Why do they disappear? How do they approach others ? Do they see others ? Why do they move us ?

Jérémie Nassif's approach shows how emotion is born, and how it makes its indelible imprint on our memory. With his camera, pencil, charcoal and inkjets, he paints his models as they enter the stage. The stage is our eye, and his figures are heartbreakingly poignant. We cannot tear ourselves away from them. We want to know everything about them. His photographs often look as if they have been painted in a mysterious black and white watercolour that gives rise to murky feelings. We have known such stretching, such twisting, such contradictions, such fights, such wrenchings and tearings of the body.

There is a purity and clarity in his work that move us, because nothing is simple when a human being appears. The effect is so powerful that it erases the world around it - and almost erases us - leaving behind a celebration of grace. When we talk about photography we often forget the staging, the way things begin, the way the action unfolds. Jérémie Nassif knows that although a photograph can be a poem, it always remains an emotion.

François-Marie Banier

Catalogue: “Envols”, published by Éditions de la Maison Européenne de la Photographie.

Image: Paul Thorel

Press contact:
Aurelie Garzuel Telephone: (33) 1 44787501 Fax: (33) 1 44787516 agarzuel@mep-fr.org

Maison Européenne de la Photographie
5/7 rue de Fourcy - 75004 Paris
Hours
Open every day from 11 am to 8 pm, except Mondays, Tuesdays and public holidays.
Tickets on sale until 7.30 pm.
Prices
Full price: 7 €
Reduced price: 4 €
Half price admission for senior citizens, students, teachers, unemployed, welfare recipients, partner subscribers.
Free admission for children under 8, cardholding disabled visitors, journalists with valid press card, group leaders.
Admission is free every Wednesday from 5 pm to 8 pm.

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