Lhe festival season is approaching. While waiting for the opening of major events dedicated to photography: from the La Gacilly festival to the Rencontres internationales d’Arles, Point offers you a selection of ten exhibitions not to be missed under any circumstances.
Dive into the margins
For its tenth anniversary, the Urban Eye festival is putting on a big spread. Lionel Antoni, founder of the event, is thus devoting a fine retrospective to William Klein by displaying around fifteen of his large-format photos on the facades of the city’s monuments (large mills, town hall, Halles, etc.). At the same time, it highlights twelve photographers engaged in the exploration of the margins. You have to spend the whole day in Corbeil to discover each of these works. Starting with that of Guillaume Herbaut. Involved in the Ukrainian field for twenty years, this 51-year-old reporter exhibits (at the Commanderie Saint-Jean) a selection of photos that tell the story of the ongoing conflict in Donbass. We would like to quote all the selected reporters. Let’s just quote John Trotter who looks at the desertification of the Southwest of the United States due to the excessive exploitation of the Colorado River. But also Anthony Micallef, who spent three years finding the inhabitants of Marseilles forced to leave their homes overnight, threatened with collapse, in the rue d’Aubagne sector. Or Rip Hopkins, who posted dozens of tender and funny portraits of the city’s inhabitants on bus shelters.
*Urban Eye Festival, in Corbeil-Essonnes. Free access until May 22. The itinerary of the exhibitions can be found on the festival website.
watch love
What does the feeling of love look like? It is to answer this question that Simon Baker, director of the European House of Photography in Paris, decided to organize one of the most daring exhibitions of the season. Fourteen photographers show their work representing love in all its forms: from romantic love at first sight to the unleashing of the most bestial erotic impulse… Sometimes tender, sometimes trashy, the images he has gathered here brew (and embrace) wide . From the prints of René Groebli, a great Swiss photographer who immortalized the honeymoon he made with his wife in the early 1950s, to the sensual portraits that Hervé Guibert devoted to his lovers. From the diaries of Nan Goldin and Nobuyoshi Araki where Eros so often rubs shoulders with Thanatos, (Araki draws the portrait of his wife, Yoko, even on her deathbed in 1990) to the images saturated with writings by RongRong & Inri. From the colorful shots of Lin Zhipeng to the magnificent black and white of Sally Mann… love unfolds its splendor there in a thousand and one ways.
*Love Songs, intimate photographsEuropean House of Photography, until August 21, 2022.
Follow women to the front
Eight women, from the 1930s to the present day, are highlighted in this ambitious exhibition from the KunstPalast in Düsseldorf. Eight artists recognized by their peers. Alongside the stars, Gerda Taro, famous photographer of the Spanish war, and Lee Miller, who covered the opening of Dachau and Buchenwald, we discover Catherine Leroy, a Frenchwoman in the field during the Vietnam war, or still Carolyn Cole and Anja Niedringhaus, present in Iraq and Afghanistan. A crossing of the century which is also a painful and essential odyssey.
*Women war photographersMuseum of the Liberation of Paris, until December 31.
Go back in time with Sophie Calle
In 1978 and 1979, Sophie Calle (then 25) squatted in a room at the then abandoned Hotel d’Orsay. Climbing the floors of this establishment which then adjoined the station of the same name, she immortalized this deserted building and tried to capture the atmosphere of this large ship stranded on the banks of the Seine, before the works drove her out of this place. “I came there to isolate myself during the day, to think about my future. I received friends there. But I wasn’t sleeping there,” she says. In the old restaurant, which she takes for a ballroom, she trains to dance in the hope of joining Bob Wilson’s troupe. At each of her visits, she picks up strange objects (keys, enamel plaques bearing the number of the rooms, various documents) which will have a decisive influence on the rest of her life. More than forty years later, the artist returns to the scene to tell in images this decisive experience in the company of the archaeologist Jean-Paul Demoule who analyzes, with the eye of the scientist, the prehistory of his work.
*The Ghosts of OrsayMusée d’Orsay, until June 12.
READ ALSOAt the Musée d’Orsay, ghosts by Sophie Calle
Leading the dolce vita with Bernard Plossu
Do we still present Bernard Plossu? This photographer, who has traveled the world since the 1960s, has been the subject of so many exhibitions… The Aix-en-Provence museum today offers the possibility of discovering a new facet of his work through a beautiful retrospective of a hundred photographs, some of which have never been seen before. Covering a wide period, from the 1970s to today, the photos on display all have Italy as their backdrop. And they strangely echo the drawings of Marius Granet which form the basis of the permanent collection of the place. Compared to Granet’s works, the rigor of Plossu’s black and white compositions is obvious. And the special rendering given to his images by the Fresson printing technique he adopted in 1967 underlines the intense poetry and extreme sensitivity that make the magic of his gaze.
*Italia discreeta, at the Granet Museum in Aix-en-Provence until August 28.
Go around the world with Graciela Iturbide
Of the great Mexican photographer, 76 years old and covered with honors, we often know the clichés of animals: these living iguanas placed on the head of a woman like a crown, the little goat which is about to be sacrificed in a ritual ceremony, flocks of birds in the sky of Guanajuato. But this very complete retrospective, whose remarkable scenography was designed by the architect Mauricio Rocha (the son of the photographer), allows a much deeper dive into the art of Iturbide. We start with immense skies, sometimes empty, captured in Bolivia or Japan… to go towards portraits, those, contemplative, of Seri Indians who live in the desert or those of gang members from Tijuana. At the end of the journey, an evidence: with an admirable mastery of black and white, a humanist sensitivity and an unusual art of composition, Graciela Iturbide is one of the great artists of our time.
*Heliotropo 37at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, until May 29.
Reconnect with Asia
He is an immense artist who had never been the subject of a personal exhibition in France. Dinh Q. Lê lives and works in the United States, but his Vietnamese origins haunt his work. Known for his technique of “weaving photographs”, a process inspired by the traditional weaving of his native country, he is now exhibiting some of his most important works in Paris. From a distance, these large formats evoke the pixelated figures of our computers. But, up close, the process of intricacy of the images evokes more a work of weaving. Taken sometimes from films, sometimes from the artist’s personal albums, these mixed photos bring out hybrid motifs where one does not always distinguish between what is fiction and what is documentary. Normal ! The work of Dinh Q. Lê, which sometimes brings to mind the work of Christian Boltanski, is entirely organized around the question of memory, where, as we know, dream and reality collide.
*Dinh Q. Lê – The thread of memoryat the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac Museum, until November 20, 2022.
Gain objectivity
Be careful, this exhibition hides another one! We first believe in a simple monograph by August Sander, centered on his famous photographic anthology 20th century menand century, a great work of 600 photos where he invites each subject to stage himself in front of his camera and paints a vast physiognomy of the Germany of his time. From this panorama and its social categories, the curators draw a broader vision of the 1920s and its flagship movement, which emerged in response to Expressionism, the New Objectivity. Hence the incursions into music, design, architecture and even cinema. The whole, fascinating, is a journey through time, towards an era which, with its anxieties and its questions, is furiously reminiscent of our own.
*Germany/ 1920s/ New ObjectivityCenter Georges-Pompidou, until September 5.
Go to Syria with the Pernots
In 1926, Léon Pernot, Mathieu’s grandfather, traveled throughout the Middle East before settling in Lebanon, where he settled and founded a family. Starting from his album from the time, carefully preserved in the family archives, Mathieu Pernot embarks – nearly 100 years later – on a route that has become eminently perilous over time. It is a question of going from Beirut to Palmyra via Tripoli, Homs or even Damascus… From the Lebanese family apartment, the photographer therefore walks towards a martyred Syria, and his shots bear witness at every moment to the brutal passage and shocking part of great history. Weaving the intimate and the collective, the work of Mathieu Pernot touches the heart. Bashar el-Assad’s face plastered over the ruins, the children of Mosul and their haunted gaze. So many photos that we will not forget.
*The ruin of his homeHenri-Cartier-Bresson Foundation, until June 19.
Discover the talents of tomorrow
Like every year, the Festival of Young European Photography takes over the Cent-Quatre. The opportunity to discover new talents, a good thirty, of fifteen different nationalities. The opportunity also to experience some shocks: the series Algernon Flowers by Dominik Fleischmann paints a striking portrait of the condition of laboratory animals, the work of the Armenian Areg Balayan bears witness to the war between his country and Azerbaijan with frankness, without detour. And then there is the fantasy of Elisabeth Gomes Barradas who reappropriates the aesthetics of R’n’B, the innocence of Michalina Kacperak’s gaze which brings out the vulnerability of her little sister, trapped in a home. dysfunctional… In a walk at the Cent-Quatre, an infinity of worlds are available to us.
*Traffic(s) 2022at the Cent-Quatre, until May 29.