Paris flash.

THE MONTH OF PHOTOGRAPHY

PARIS 

NOVEMBER 2-DECEMBER 1, 2006

By early November, photography adorned Paris, the City of Lights, in a total of sixty city-wide exhibitions celebrating "The Month of Photography." Divided roughly into three categories, these shows featured historic photography, photographic oeuvres, and images produced primarily for the mass media. New views by artists such as Joel Meyerowitz and Xavier Zimmermann were seen alongside such historic and well-known images as the rayograms of Man Ray (at the Jeu de Paume-Concorde). Collectively, however, curators and gallerists alike used this moment to refashion European photography as a genre that shares a close connection to painting. Several different photo events that took place throughout the city emphasized the significance that photography holds within the contemporary culture of Paris.

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"The Movement of Images" at the Centre George Pompidou opened several months before the Month of Photography and began to convey a close relationship between photography and film. Inspired by Walter Benjamin's assertion that "it is less necessary to know whether photography and film have to do with art than to understand how they alter the perception we have of it," (1) this exhibition moved away from concerns surrounding the relationship between optics and chemicals in order to examine the photograph's "unfixed character." (2) Within the areas of montage, narrative, unwinding, and projection, artist films such as Richard Serra's Hand Catching Lead (1968) and Chris Burden's Documentation of Selected Works (1971-74) were juxtaposed with modernist works of art. The repetition of blue, red, green, yellow, and orange leaves in Henri Matisse's Vitrail bleu pale (1948-49), for example, along with Josef Albers's "Homage to the Square" series (1967) and Donald Judd's Stack (1972), suggested that repetitive motifs set within the context of a square frame expose a connection between the plastic arts, photography, and the moving image. Whether these plastic stills can indeed be connected to either the medium of film or photography remains a subject of debate. However, the montage photographs of Moi Ver in "Paris. 80 Photographs" (1931) reflect a combination of the figurative and abstract caused by camera movement. Together they seem to incorporate different types of abstract art within the photograph.

The argument for photography as art continued in another exhibition at the Pompidou, "Painters of Modern Life," from the collection of the French investment company La Caisse des Depots et Consignations. The large photographs in the first room were printed in large format and evenly spaced out. Grouped under the title "Power," the stacked papers of Hannah Collins's Listen (1994) and the blue-collar workers in Andreas Gursky's Siemens, Amberg (1991) reflect the subject within a controlled four-sided square frame. In addition, Fouad Elkoury's Le Monde (2001) captures the theme of the post-9/11 era in a full-page depiction of an article published in that newspaper in 2001 titled, "Being Arab in New York." Thomas Demand's representation of graduated bleachers in Tribune (1995) further underscores the subtle visual motif of the square. The curators may have sought to establish a conceptual connection between the image and artistic frame; however, that connection remained clusive.

The second room, "France and the World," consisted of small and large pictures arranged salon style, cluttering the viewer's gaze with diverse scenes including an empty storefront in Thierry Girard's Guerel, Creuse (2001), a private backyard in Veronique Ellena's Les Dimanches (1997), and a small family kitchen in Florence Paradeis's "Sans Titre-Serie 1: 1988-1989" (1989). The third room, "Fictions," featured works that capture both real and imagined landscapes along with digitally manipulated studio shots. Fictive Realities 2--Sea Lions' Cage--Loro Parque, Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife (1998) by Thomas Mangold depicts an idealized, empty living environment belonging to captured sea lions whereas Philippe Ramette's Balcony II (Hong Kong) (2001) echoes Yves Klein's black-and-white Leap into the Void (1960), in which a man jumps off a brick wall onto the street. However, Ramette's piece is much more constrained, featuring a man standing on a balcony that moves vertically through ocean water. The skyline of Hong Kong, tilted ninety degrees to the right, outlines the unreal event taking place on the left.

These painterly suggestions vanished in Meyerowitz's exhibition, "Out of the Ordinary" at the Jeu de Paume-Sully. Consisting of images taken between 1970 and 1980, Meyerowitz exposed the bizarre side of the mundane that appeared primarily in New York City at that time. Made before social issues such as sexual harassment, domestic abuse, and animal cruelty became strong political themes, many of these images produced an accidental shock effect. The nudist party seen in Woodstock, New York (1973) includes a small group of men and women participating in a seance. Likewise, the carcass of a dead deer strapped to the roof of a red car in From the Car, New York Thruway (1973) appeared cruel if not careless, as does the hand-off in New York City (1975), which takes place on a crowded corner near Times Square. The urban scenes that Meyerowitz captured, moreover, are either eerily vacant or extremely low-rise, causing his New York cityscapes to appear empty while flooded with light.

The unpopulated landscape was also the subject of Zimmermann's collection of new work, "Ordinary Passages" (2006). On view at Galerie Polaris and the Abbey of Maubuisson, (3) these large-format shots of either distant landscape or close-up details explored the foundation related to one's development of critical thinking. Using the grounds of a thirteenth-century abbey that served as a military hospital during the French Revolution and now functions primarily as an exhibition space for contemporary art, Zimmermann chose to create site-specific work that all but excluded the abbey from view. Instead, the photographer's images present various observations such as a village in the distance, foliage and grass at close range, and the county's empty forest lit up at night by a car's headlights.

The notions of painting and collage resurfaced in the work of Erich Nehr and Catherine Poncin. At the Galerie Anne Barrault, Nehr presented a series of intimate but largely unknown portraits of individuals whose faces and figures came close to achieving full transparency. Due to a bright white background and the sitters' pale skin and light hair color, Nehr's subjects appeared nearly invisible or flushed out by white light. Poncin also obscured identity in her work at the Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire by mixing fragments of historic images with others that are more contemporary. Photography critic Paul Ardenne has categorized Poncin's work as "Post-Photography" since it fashions what was and what is into new narratives.

The play between art and technique was never reconciled one way or another within any of these exhibitions. As collector Sylvio Perlstein stated in an interview about his early modern photography collection: "Photography is a passion all in its own .... Of course you can say, 'I like the image.' But do you know what is really involved in a rare photo? It is a complex, subtle medium." (4) The field of photography is still open to more creative exploration. Like the shows discussed here, the use of digital technique was not as visually apparent, leaving each exhibition with a significant amount of authenticity when compared to the quick and kitschy Photoshop techniques that have recently been surfacing throughout galleries in New York City.

NOTES (1.) As cited in Philippe Alain-Michaud, The Movement of Images (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2006), 15. The exhibition "The Movement of Images" is on view through January 29, 2007. (2.) Ibid. (3.) "Ordinary Passages" is on view through February 26, 2007. (4.) Sylvio Perlstein, Busy Going Crazy (Paris: Maison Rouge, 2006), 129. "Busy Going Crazy" is on view through January 14, 2007.

JILL CONNER is an art critic based in New York City.