This is the last blog in a series of three about photography exhibitions in Paris, France, while I was there in November 2018. The first two blogs were about Paris Photo, the world’s biggest show of art photography. This blog is about all the other photography shows going on at the same time.
Ed Malcik surrounded by back-lit fashion photos by Daido Moriyama in a tiny pop-up gallery sponsored by Yves Saint-Laurent.
Museums and galleries in Paris ride the coattails of Paris Photo and organize their own photography exhibitions, and I keep a list of the ones I want to see. But my wife and I literally stumbled on an amazing show in the Palais Royale, a sprawling 17th century complex of shops and apartments. We were on our way to dinner at Maceo, and we cut through the beautiful garden of the Palais. There in a courtyard was a translucent white plastic rectangular box bathed in light. We walked over. A banner explained that this was an exhibition called Self by the Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama (him again) organized by the Yves Saint Laurent fashion organization. It was an unannounced pop-up photo gallery in a prestigious location (read expensive) for only three days. The gallery was the size of a couple of large cargo containers with two doors. The black-suited guards invited us in. I had not seen anything like it before: the walls, ceiling, and floor were covered in high-contrast 11” x 14” black-and-white photos covered in plexiglass, and back-lit so that the pictures and indeed the whole interior glowed. Now, this is going to sound stupid, but I was so surprised by the unusual setting—I’m not used to looking at photos under my feet—that it was hard to think about the photographs themselves; I remember the entirety of the exhibition more than individual pictures, the forest more than the trees. The pictures were shot at night in Japan in street-photography style, but, odd for Moriyama, not so rough or out of focus. Looking closer at the pictures, I realized the people in them were models whom my wife said were wearing Saint Laurent designs, and then I realized that the photos were from a fashion shoot. Occasionally there was a photo of a flower that was almost pretty—not a typical Moriyama subject. There were maybe 30 different pictures that were repeated to fill the space. I couldn’t help but think of the costs involved in designing the concept, building the box, paying some sort of nasty rent for the prestigious space, and then not have many people see it because the show was not announced—what’s with that? Why keep something like this secret? And then take it all back to the warehouse after three days. Amazing. Curious. This was Paris Photo dancing with Paris fashion. It’s a helluva town.
Now for something completely different at the Museum of European Photography. While the venue is a typical museum, the photos were printed on ships, trains, houses and walls by the French photographer and designer JR. If you don’t know who he is you haven’t been paying attention. Most of his projects involve shooting distorted wide-angle photos of people in poverty or conflict zones mugging for the camera, and then pasting the prints 100-feet tall on buildings where they live, the idea being that from these simple and funny photos that show no evidence of poverty or conflict, everyone just looks human. JR won the TED prize in 2011, was nominated for a documentary Oscar in 2018 for his film Faces Places, and shot the photos for last month’s excellent special edition of Time on guns in America. His Paris exhibition showed several projects. One room had a large model container ship with a gantry crane loading shipping containers that had sections of a huge face pasted on the sides. Initially with only a few containers the face was unrecognizable, but after a while it came together. Then the cranes removed the containers and the face dissolved. A photo showed the ship underway as a face sliding across the sea. Another room had a model of an East African hillside village where JR had pasted huge photos of faces on houses. The faces are missing the eyes, but then a train comes through with eyes pasted to containers, and for a brief instant the faces and eyes come together in a complete face. If I was amazed at the expense and complexity of the Saint Laurent/Moriyama fashion box, thinking about the organization and management JR needs for his projects is next to mind boggling, and the museum showed letters to companies and governments, project designs, organization charts, and expense sheets. Makes the problems with your pet photo project pale in comparison, doesn’t it?
I know it is not polite to start describing the photography exhibition of photographer Martine Franck by talking about her husband, but I will anyway because her husband was the greatest photographer of the 20th century, and her exhibition was held at the museum named for him, the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson. Franck was born in Belgium, grew up in the UK and United States, and became a photojournalist for the big picture magazines. When she first met Cartier-Bresson he is supposed to have used one of the best pick-up lines any photographer ever used, “Martine, I want to come see your contact sheets.” It worked, they married in 1970, and in 1983 she became a Magnum photographer. Her exhibition was an extensive retrospective, covering the whole floor of the new museum for which her show is the museum’s first at its new location in the Marais, only opening this autumn in time for Paris Photo. Her photos are reserved, thoughtful, and without conflict. Unlike many of the Magnum photographers she didn’t cover war or political strife, and instead concentrated on humanitarian issues like schoolboys in a Nepalese Buddhist monastery, the residents of a small Irish island to which she returned many times, and portraits of artists and writers. Hers are well done, quiet pictures that hold your attention when viewing them in sequence, but few are remembered afterward. Some of her better known pictures are of her husband drawing, which he did later in life after giving up photography.
The Paris museum showing the photographic exhibition “Willy Ronis by Willy Ronis.”
I am a big fan of the humanist French photographer Willy Ronis, who developed delightful compositions of people on the street, and thus I sought out his retrospective in a new museum in the working class Bellville area of the 20th arrondissement. As museums go this one has the area pretty much to itself. The exhibition, “Willy Ronis by Willy Ronis,” was in the 18th-century Pavillion Carre de Baudouin not far from where Ronis lived, and right in the middle of where he regularly photographed. A video showed him walking around the neighborhood talking about where he took his popular pictures and how the area had changed. Ronis died in 2009 at age 99. The exhibition was large and, of course, included his better-known images such as the boy running down the street with a baguette under his arm, the “Nude Provencal” of a young woman with her back turned at a sink before an open window (which was Ronis’ wife), the kissing couple atop the Bastille column, the two boys playing in an empty barge sailing down the Seine, and the little girl in Venice crossing a plank onto a boat. While I was familiar with all those, I hadn’t seen his political pictures of labor strikes, and I hadn’t known that he was a lifelong supporter of leftist causes.
The one major exhibition I did not see in Paris was the Dorothea Lange retrospective at the Jeu de Plume because I saw it a couple of months earlier when it was at the Barbican in London. It was spectacular, showing a greater variety of her work than I had seen before, as well as a small room dedicated to different versions of her most famous picture, “Migrant Mother,” and how she worked hard in the darkroom to remove a distracting thumb from the mother’s left hand that was around the child.
A poster in a laundromat advertises the exhibition of Dorothea Lange’s photography at the Jeu de Plume Museum in Paris by using her most famous picture, “Migrant Mother.”
The one bit of photo seeing that I could have done without was to tour the 36 galleries that were together called Photo Saint Germain. After all the big shows that I have described above, there was nothing, nothing that caught my eye in the galleries of the 6th arrondissement, including the Josef Sudek show at the Centre Tcheque de Paris. But, it was a beautiful sunny day, and it is always fun to walk around the Saint Germain area with its cafes, including my favorite, La Palette, where we spent the evening with a bottle of wine and a cheese plate.