The painting model dominated photography in the 1990s and 2000s. It imposed its large format, often over two metres, and frames so thick that they embodied the question of the monumental in photography. The latter, however, cannot merely be reduced to the former.The PRISMES section of the 2018 edition of Paris Photo shows, in fact, that beyond the pictorial tendencies of a segment of contemporary photography, photographic monumentality should also be considered in terms of cinema, sculpture and architecture. Technical advances, the possibility of producing large-scale colour prints, is not enough to explain the emergence of photographic tableaux in the 1970s and 1980s. Interviewed in the previous issue of artpress, Jeff Wall, a pioneer in the field after Urs Lüthi and Katharina Sieverding, spoke of his desire to explore certain neglected aspects of photography, particularly in the fields of scale and colour. He also pointed out his desire to position photography in a polemical relationship with painting so as to overcome the period’s modernist orthodoxy, which established the artistic character of photography on its singularity in comparison with other mediums. This movement towards painting continued in the 1980s and was extended by the first generation of Bernd Becher’s students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, some of whom continue this form even today. Amongst them, Axel Hütte, whose Austrian gallery Nikolaus Ruzicska displays excerpts from

Rheingau (2009–2010), named after the Rhine region photographed after the war by Albert Renger-Patzsche. The series includes modest formats, but also very large ones. A lover of landscape, Hütte is sometimes described as a painter. Such a designation is not unfounded in that this series seems to borrow from the history of painting, inspired by Romantic landscapes—its sweeping vistas, distant viewpoints, the Gothic ruins of the Wernerkapelle and the sense of loneliness—but also by abstraction: the compositions of trunks and foliage are veritable all-over works.

Rheingau is a series. Yet it can be so characterized less by the number of images than by its material characteristics, the sense that some of the work tends towards the monumental. Admittedly, sets of images can also give this impression, for example, the polyptychs of Gilbert & George, Antoine d’Agata’s mosaics on wallpaper or, less dense, the constellations in which WolfgangTillmans excels. But this year, PRISMES does not feature any of these, unlike the series that gather images around a subject, and are contingent ensembles and of a variable geometry. Let us take for example, Galerie Esther Woerdehoff with the aesthetic, indeed aestheticizing variations evident in Isabel Muñoz’s work around the body or, in a more analytical register, the project No Thing Dies (2017) by Ilit Azoulay based around the collections from the Museum of Israel in Jerusalem, displayed by Braverman Gallery. One of these series however, is an exception in that it seems to be an indivisible ensemble. This Is Sieranevada (2016) by Romanian director Cristi Puiu, presented by the Baril Gallery. In search of an image for the poster of his latest film, Puiu crossed Bucharest from east to west, taking over 9,000 images, 152 of which form this series that is similar to a sequence shot, sometimes even a tracking shot.

CRYSTALIZATION

Far from the rigid volumetrics of painting or the mass effect of the series, sculpture unfolds the soft forms of photographic matter. Two works bear witness to this. For example, Galeria Lume presents Por um

Fio (Negativo) (1977–2004) by Brazilian artist Ana Vitoria Mussi who, although born in 1943, remains unknown in Europe. Evoking a waterfall, this sculpture is made up of 22,000 negatives which, connected by threads, seem to pour down from the top of the picture rail. Made using shots taken by the artist in the 1970s and 1980s while covering the events of the wealthiest social classes for the press in order to make a living, this work is not devoid of criticism of Brazilian society, but also, perhaps, in terms of her own image-producing practice, rendered illegible here in a quasiiconoclastic gesture. This is not the case with Taisuke Koyama whose installation of long photographic prints half-rolled on racks, presented by Italian gallery Metronom, scrutinizes on the contrary, the very heart of the image. This Japanese photographer is part of the younger generation for whom photography is fluid and, created in a process that hybridizes techniques and increases interventions, is constantly in flux. Pico (2015) is therefore the result of an image from an earlier series, Rainbow Form (2009), from which he extracts, under a microscope, a tiny detail that he then enlarges to obtain these large monochromes, freely moving strips between which the viewer can circulate. Photography conquers space. In a close relationship with architecture, it ends up constituting it. The Hamilton Gallery presents a unique work, a reproduction of Daido Moriyama’s Lip Bar (2005). The photographer was invited to cover Tokyo’s Kuro bar from floor-to-ceiling with the same image, a close-up of red lips. From the authoritarian and autonomous object to the environment, via an indefinite, even shapeless volume, the issue of the monumental in photography does not lead to a single answer. It should also be put into a historical perspective since many contemporary works reflect the experimentation of the inter-war period, then referred to as ‘photographic mosaics’ or ‘still film images’. However, one thing is certain: this question crystallizes more than others the productive and disruptive tensions that exist between photography and other art forms. Translation: Emma Lingwood for all the Photo dossier texts