Paris hosts an exclusive art exhibition
Simon de Burton visits an important new photo exhibition in Paris
LOTS HAPPENED NEAR the beginning of the 20th Century, but it’s thanks to advancements in the design of two particular objects that you’re sitting comfortably with this issue of Octane. No, we’re not talking about pipes and slippers or armchairs and whisky tumblers, but about the photographic camera and the motor car. Machines both, entirely different in make-up and purpose, yet inextricably linked for more than a century.
That’s the basic premise behind a captivating exhibition running at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris for the next three months. If you’re interested in cars, pictures of cars, the history of cars and the impact they’ve had on society, then, to use a suitably mechanical term, you’ll be riveted.
Co-curated by editor-in-chief of the French magazine AUTOhebdo Philippe Seclier and publisher Xavier Barral, the show was two years in the making and features more than 500 images captured by 100 photographers. They range from true greats such as Jacques Henri Lartigue and Robert Doisneau to lesser-known lensmen – among them a police accident investigator, a New York cabbie, and the border patrol officers of the East German Stasi who took humiliating ‘evidential’ photographs of people secreted in the boots of cars, caught trying to cross the border into West Germany.
There are pictures of cars from the top, from the side and from underneath; pictures of people living in cars and making love in them; pictures of the parts that make up cars; pictures of cars in chaos, the roads built to run them on, the full and empty car parks they occupy and the peculiar situations they end up in (find out, for example, how a V8 Vantage ended-up buried at an archaeological dig in Israel).
‘The idea for the exhibition was born from a drive I did across the US in order to make a documentary film based on Robert Frank’s 1958 book The Americans,’ explains Seclier.
‘The film was called An American Journey and I covered 20,000 kilometres in three years.
What I saw along the way inspired me to put together a photographic show about cars, their huge impact on society and our relationships with them. Xavier and I started with a database of 10,000 images and reduced that to the 500 we eventually selected – it was a major task, and another type of journey for us.’
The images have been borrowed from dead photographers’ estates, galleries, museums, private collectors and, in many cases, the artists themselves. ‘We decided to start the exhibition with images from the early 1900s because that was the time when cars and photography both started to become central to life,’ says Seclier. ‘It’s the largest show of its type ever staged.’
Among Seclier’s favourites are the 30 Ed Ruscha shots taken during the 1960s that show giant American parking lots from the air because, he says, they demonstrate just how dramatically the landscape has been reshaped by the presence of the automobile.
He’s also impressed by 30-year-old Italian photographer Ronni Campana’s series of seven images depicting ‘Badly Repaired Cars’, which includes shots of gaffer-taped bodywork, electric mirrors shrouded in plastic carrier bags, and manually operated ones held together with Sellotape. ‘They remind us that you have to look after your car just as you would look after your own body,’ opines Seclier.
Organised in chronological order, the exhibition begins with a series of shots taken by Swiss photographer Guido Sigriste showing cars competing in the 1903 Paris-Madrid race. They’re remarkable not only for their composition – the cars in a pan-flat landscape before a spartan background of trees – but also because they were taken with a camera he invented, which featured the original highspeed shutter, thus enabling rapid movement to be ‘frozen’ for the first time.
It led to the creation of celebrated images featured in the show, such as Jacques Henri Lartigue’s 1912 depiction of the back end of a Delage (you know the one – blurred road, blurred people, elliptical wheel and pin-sharp car) along with Man Ray’s distorted, speeding car shot from ground level.
Among these early automobile images, there are also some superb photographs from the
Croisière Noir and Croisière Jaune expeditions to central Africa and central Asia that were undertaken by Citroën in 1924-25 and 1931-32 using Kégresse tracked vehicles.
The chronology is, however, disturbed near the entrance by the positioning of a video loop showing photographs that, for me, captured the very essence of what the exhibition is all about. ‘Cars – New York City, 1974-1976’ is a series of 115 images taken by Langdon Clay, who was then aged in his mid-20s. All shot at night and featuring lone vehicles captured side-on and parked in front of a variety of different buildings and bathed in other-worldy light, they are, quite simply, perfectly nuanced.
They are unquestionably my stars of the show – so it is serendipitous to discover that, when I sit down for lunch in a room filled with 100 people, my neighbour happens to be none other than Clay himself.
Now 68, he explains that he had moved to New York in 1971 and earned a living by painting houses. A friend had a darkroom, so Clay took up photography and began to shoot cars in black-and-white and print the images.
‘I used to walk the ten blocks home from a friend’s place most nights, and started to photograph whole streets of cars,’ Clay explains. ‘But then it seemed to make more sense to use colour and, from that, I didn’t take long to get down to photographing just individual cars, all from the side, and only those with great backgrounds. I found out that if I used a Leica CL with a 40mm lens, that would enable me to get exactly what I wanted in the frame from the other side of the street, so I didn’t have to stand in the road and get run over. It doesn’t work nowadays though,’ Clay tells me wistfully.
‘Modern cars are too similar, there are too many of them and they don’t have the character. Believe me, I’ve tried. I went back to five of the same places recently, took photographs of what was there – and the result just wasn’t very interesting.’ Which is probably one of the reasons why you’re an Octane reader, why you’ll love this show, and why you should organise a trip to Paris as soon as you can.
A word of warning, though: don’t be tempted to drive. The traffic is terrible…