Images between Presence and Absence
Épreuves de la matière follows on from a number of exhibitions about photographic materiality which have been held over the last ten years. How can this widespread interest be explained? What are the specific features of the BnF exhibition? This question of materiality underwent a form of reset when the speed, fluidity and multitude commonly associated with digital images led some photographers to favour a slower, handmade and rarer form of photography, and sometimes a more ecological one. The BnF’s collection allows us to place these current trends within a broader history of photographic materiality. In the 1980s, Jean-Claude Lemagny, then a curator of photography, became drawn to what he called “creative photography,” to practices that were as much about the material represented, often in an abstract vein, as about the material embodied in a particular photographic process or print. Echoing what we have been seeing, for example, at Paris Photo for the last five or six years, I was keen to develop a reflection on this enthusiasm for matter.
What period does the exhibition cover?
It is quite broad. It begins in the 1960s and 1970s. The oldest work is a chemigram by Pierre Cordier, and the most recent is a print by Maxime Riché incorporating the ashes of burnt pine trees from the town of Paradise in California. I believe it is important to show, particularly to the younger generation, that the questions they are currently asking themselves are part of a history.
Why not go back to the origins of photo
graphy? From the 1970s to the 1980s, the institutionalisation of photography, the link between matter and politics, and reflections about the archive constituted a major turning point compared with previous periods, when the question of materiality was not conceptualised in the same way. Take the example of the photogram. In avant-garde movements, it contributed to a claim of the autonomy of photography in relation to the other arts, in that it crystallised the specificities of the medium, whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, the photographers who practised it emphasised the unique, non-reproducible nature of the photogram in order to establish the institutional legitimacy of their medium. In this way, the reflection about materiality does not have the same scope in a photogenic drawing by Talbot, a rayograph by Man
Ray or a photogram by Ellen Carey, despite the fact that they emanate from the same process.
MATRIX, MEDIUM, PROCESS
Did this question of materiality take different forms throughout the period covered by the exhibition? There were different generations. For the generation of the 1970s and 1980s, photographic materiality was more a question of the matrix, in terms of its relationship to the history of photography—Patrick Bailly-Maître-Grand’s daguerreotypes, for example—and of the medium, in a post-modernist period that challenged Clement Greenberg’s claim to the ontological purity of the photograph—Paolo Gioli’s Hommage à Cézanne (1982), for example. The generation of the 2000s, for its part, considered photographic matter in its process dimension: experimental approaches emerged that took the liberty of revisiting the pioneering photographic processes— from the calotype to the orotone, by way of the ambrotype—whilst disregarding the history or aesthetics they implied. Both technique and material became timeless.
Despite the common conception of the dematerialisation of digital technology, the latter is very present in the exhibition, including artificial intelligence (AI). How has digital technology reactivated the question of materiality? I wanted this exhibition to be both retrospective and forward-looking. I didn’t want to dwell on the nostalgia for analogue photography. Digital technology has its own materiality, as does AI, but there are not many screens in the exhibition. For Gregory Chatonsky and Lauren Moffatt, digital technology and AI are simply tools for creating forms that are then embodied in a print, but whose materiality can branch out thanks to virtual reality, as in Moffatt’s Compost series (since 2021). The exhibition is permeated by this metaphor of compost and organic elements, and AI exemplifies this question of the body in mutation, in line with current societal debates.
So far you have talked a lot about prints. What are the other threads in the exhibition? Photographic materiality calls on a variety of media: mud in Lucas Leffler’s work, salt in Ilanit Illouz’s, leaves in Almudena Romero’s, as well as a variety of techniques—an electron microscope for Yves Trémorin, a thermal camera for SMITH, a hologram for Michael Snow, and projection for Oscar Muñoz. Visual references are hybridised: sculpture in the work of Noémie Goudal, which re-enacts the effects of the pinhole camera; ceramics in the work of Denis Darzacq and Anna Iris Lünneman; drawing in the work of Anne-Lise Broyer, etc. Alain Fleischer’s installation, which brings the exhibition to a close, must be activated by the viewer, who plays with mirrors in order to materialise the projected image. I wanted the exhibition to be a total synaesthetic experience, not just a visual one.
All this experimentation and hybridisation makes one wonder whether the notion of the photographic medium has any meaning nowadays. Photography, in its original definition as a gelatin-silver print on baryta paper, still exists and is being championed more than ever, as demonstrated by the exhibition Noir & Blanc, une esthétique de la photographie, which is being presented alongside Épreuves de la matière at the BnF. But since photography flirts with painting, sculpture, video, cinema and so on, it would be futile to try and assign it a single definition. We must favour the mysteries of metamorphosis to the illusion of identity. Our contemporary world is criss-crossed by flows of images, which we first consult on screen, but from the moment they become embodied in a specific material, they reactivate our attention in a different way. Épreuves de la matière is intended to be manifesto for the visual experiences it brings together, offering a form of enchantment that only a dialogue with the original, a physical contact with the work, can provide.
FRAGMENTED PROPOSALS
The everyday experience of the image is the transparency of representation. One might think that an emphasis on materiality would lead to abstract works. Yet this is far from being the case. How does materiality interact with representation? First and foremost, we can see a desire to revisit the canonical genres of art history—landscape, portrait, etc.—but each time with a contemporary slant. For example, the Iranian artist Morvarid K. uses green biro to cover photographs of burnt eucalyptus trees, victims of the mega-fires in Australia, to give them a presence and to dress the wounds of the forest. Jean-Pierre Bonfort, for his part, has printed photographs of mountains on paper towel, using this fragile medium to
highlight the vulnerability of the depicted landscapes. The portrait becomes multiple, a palimpsest, as in Laurent Lafolie’s work, which presents a mobile of platinum-palladium prints in which the single identity no longer exists. In her series X Puissance X (2012-15), Lisa Sartorio uses images from the news to create a representation that is not immediately obvious. From a distance, it looks like printed African cloth. The closer you get, the more you see that the kaleidoscope represents images of conflict and famine taken from the internet. These images are part of raising awareness about the continual scroll that flattens out our vision of images and the world.
This “matierism” or materialism is therefore in no way a formalism. The question of the materiality of images reveals a real fragmentation of proposals that precludes any essentialist categorisation. Beyond the possible hybridisations between different media, I like the material ambiguity that emanates from certain works, such as Harmony of Chaos (2012-19) by Renato D’Agostin, which summons up all the imagination of drawing even though it uses exclusively photographic processes.
You mentioned that in connection with the ecological crisis. It is a photograph that tackles contemporary issues. The feminist question is also present in the exhibition. There are a great number of women photographers in the exhibition, who use the medium with the aim of proposing new representations of femininity. Whilst embroidery was already practised in the 1960s by women artists wishing to denounce misogyny and oppression, it takes on a more intimate character in the work of Carolle Benitah, who weaves new stories into the photographs in her family albums. The feminist question, seen through the prism of photographic materiality, is now less about the struggle for demands than about the possibility of reparation. This is the case in the series Les Oubliées (2021) by Anaïs Boudot, who has collected broken glass plates depicting women in the early twentieth century and repaired them using the Japanese method of kintsugi, thereby literally regilding their image.
The final part of the exhibition considers the precariousness of images. Is the exhibition an elegy to photography? By examining the decay of the archival image in the work of Chantal Stoman, Bogdan Konopka, Éric Rondepierre, Joan Fontcuberta and others, and the accidental nature of Sigmar Polke’s photographic still lifes and Véronique Bourgoin’s paraffin-soaked ones, this section raises questions about my curatorial role. When you’re the curator of a public collection, there is a desire to register that heritage in eternity: we have to ward off loss, but couldn’t we also embrace the vulnerability of photographic matter? Artists approach this subject with less deference than we do. The question arose, for example, when I wanted to acquire Anne-Lou Buzot’s anthotypes, made from the juice of lightsensitive plants that are doomed to disappear if exposed to light for too long. The photographer suggested giving me two anthotypes that could be “sacrificed” for the duration of the exhibition, and one that would be preserved in the darkness of the storerooms. All this thinking on the part of the younger generation, who are keen to introduce us to the secrets of the laboratory, is also reflected in the current valorisation of printing as an art form.
To go back to your question, the elegiac dimension of the exhibition questions the disappearance of the image in various ways: through emptiness, but also through fullness, as in the work of Rossella Bellusci, where an excess of light dazzles the figure and obliterates it. The final part of the exhibition plays on this dialectic of presence and absence, which can be found in Vittoria Gerardi’s Latenza series (since 2021), and which is at the heart of photographic matter.
Translation: Juliet Powys
Héloïse Conésa is a heritage curator, Head of the Photography Department, Curator of Contemporary Photography in the Department of Prints and Photography, BnF.