Bruno Boudjelal,  Alger © Bruno Boudjelal / Agence VU
Bruno Boudjelal, Alger © Bruno Boudjelal / Agence VU

Algérie, clos comme on ferme un livre ?
Bruno Boudjelal, 2009 - 2011
20 10 2012 ... 20 01 2013

Bruno Boudjelal  La maison hantée, Alger série « Frantz Fanon » © Bruno Boudjelal / Agence VU
Bruno Boudjelal La maison hantée, Alger série « Frantz Fanon » © Bruno Boudjelal / Agence VU
Bruno Boudjelal  Alger série « Frantz Fanon » © Bruno Boudjelal / Agence VU
Bruno Boudjelal Alger série « Frantz Fanon » © Bruno Boudjelal / Agence VU

When he went to Algeria in search of his roots in the nineties, Bruno Boudjelal discovered a country that was wounded to the core by contemporary political events. With the support of the musée Nicéphore Niépce, he has returned repeatedly over the past three years to continue his narrative in pictures, this time confronting it with the vision of the writers and journalists who bear witness to the complex everyday reality of this country.

Constantly deteriorating shades.

As the background noise of the commemorations starts to fade, Algeria distances itself again. Despite efforts that involve convoking History with a capital H and memory, organising derisory little ceremonies, we can not manage to re-establish a link, however tenuous, between two peoples and two countries, worse, we can not even create a new link. Algeria is a journey that must constantly begin all over again. Not a journey we want to repeat, each time we are obliged to start everything from scratch. History fulfils no one’s expectations. When faced with one another, the protagonists of this drama do nothing but glare, stripped of all reassuring resources.

Algeria is an overwhelming mountain that Sisyphus will never climb. The Mediterranean is a wall, less shameful than others, but just as impassable.

We understand that some have no other solution than to go back to their native land. It is a well-known situation, one foot in, one foot out, always clomping, so crossing the country is generally a sentimental experience. Disappointment is never far away when relating personal experience. From the original fracture to his now regular trips, Bruno Boudjelal chronicles his own story. His curiosity and incessant doubts burst out from behind each image. It is less a question of a return and reunion than the anguish of adventuring into the superficial that directs the photographer to places chosen in advance. The man, more than the photographer, is in search of a story that is unique, obviously, but above all he is in search of respectable men. He takes to the road with the firm intention not to tackle the past but the present.

Algeria is a pious wish. Because it is so faithful to itself! The impressions are exactly those we expect, those we have heard of. There have been many trips recently so the surprise, fascination, disappointment, anger have all been well documented in books and exhibitions. Lime melts in the sun and Bruno Boudjelal repainted Algeria in the only real colours, pastel and melancholy. This presentation would rapidly become invasive were it not for this colour, this subtle beauty to depict the corrosion and the obsolescence. Algeria has abandoned red and green to cover itself in ashes and washed-out colours.

I remember Ben Bella being presented to the international press. I can still see his face. The victory of the Algerian people began that day. And France, the initiator of the aerial piracy, lost all dignity the same day. The glorious age of the fellaghas ended just as quickly. After the lost honour of the national revolution, what is left to Bruno Boudjelal, but to pursue the pure, the just; Frantz Fanon. He provided the journey with its urgency. Only the Creole doctor, the militant revolutionary, was able to find the native country, side by side with the fellahs, the poverty-stricken and the sick. The photographer’s journey is not a happy one. It is relatively lucid, it shows us the frozen expressions of Algerian earth, the traits of those who went back and were transformed into pillars of salt.

Everything is blended in a photographic history where all things are valid; those who witnessed the war for national liberation, the old patients from the Blida hospital and the dirty war are all mixed together in this closed world. But the second war, that which has no name, a cursed and mute experience, suffered by everyone, wins out.

Here, rather than melancholy, the odious dominates. The journey is filled with nameless, silent people of extraordinary density. Certain events go beyond words and here, photography manages to record this heavy silence. This bears witness to an almost compulsive need to refer back to type. No one stands out in places without prestige. However, everyone knows how to play their role in the multiple narratives extracted from the Algerian abyss. It is a question of survival.

Melancholy blends badly with darkness and despair. However, it can take proximity to whiteness, a compact white that washes Algeria of its historical colours. Whiten it, absolve it, a masochistic plan that doubles as an attempt to understand, admitting that one can never become the other. And above all, would never want to.

Images of repressed feelings with their cortege of sadness. History is not given; it is created at every turn, in the middle of the mist, on the edge of a road badly in need of repair.
 Transport without exaltation, Bruno Boudjelal follows the road traced by necessity, without protest. It is a journey without illusions in a suspended time. This personal journey where the photographer never finds himself, contributes to the bitter narrative of a people who are never discouraged. The story is in a loop, a labyrinth where not one photograph indicates the exit.

Through the filter of a car window in the opaque night, Algerian figures fade, forming a collection of sketches rather than witnesses. A return to origins when the collection of pastel drawings and sketches was enough to know people and countries. Night and day, day and night, villages and towns follow in the constant deterioration of shades.

In the blurry nights in weakly coloured light, Bruno Boudjelal follows neither bodies nor emotions and even less lost lives. Ennui dominates all, the event that demands the shot that shapes the print. This immeasurable ennui that binds Algerians together despite the familiar noises, the ball games and the lover’s walks. One of the most painful aspects of this era of little glory is without a doubt this listlessness that has seized bodies. A spleen without discordance, in an inorganic time where nothing ever changes.
 Cursed photography, the perfect metaphor for a time that has stopped.

François Cheval
 Curator of the musée Nicéphore Niépce

Bruno Boudjelal  Alger centre © Bruno Boudjelal / Agence VU
Bruno Boudjelal Alger centre © Bruno Boudjelal / Agence VU
Bruno Boudjelal  Chlef © Bruno Boudjelal / Agence VU
Bruno Boudjelal Chlef © Bruno Boudjelal / Agence VU
Bruno Boudjelal  Quartier de Bab El Oued, Alger. © Bruno Boudjelal / Agence VU
Bruno Boudjelal Quartier de Bab El Oued, Alger. © Bruno Boudjelal / Agence VU
Bruno Boudjelal  Alger la grande poste © Bruno Boudjelal / Agence VU
Bruno Boudjelal Alger la grande poste © Bruno Boudjelal / Agence VU
Bruno Boudjelal  Blida, Série « Frantz Fanon » © Bruno Boudjelal / Agence VU
Bruno Boudjelal Blida, Série « Frantz Fanon » © Bruno Boudjelal / Agence VU
musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
Anonyme / Combier Imprimerie Mâcon Plage de Philippeville, vers 1950 © musée Nicéphore Niépce
Anonyme / Combier Imprimerie Mâcon Plage de Philippeville, vers 1950 © musée Nicéphore Niépce

Algérie, clos comme on ferme un livre?

Archives

20 10 2012 ... 20 01 2013

Anonyme, Ouargla – groupe d’officiers sur la porte de la Casbah, fin du XIXe siècle  © musée Nicéphore Niépce
Anonyme, Ouargla – groupe d’officiers sur la porte de la Casbah, fin du XIXe siècle © musée Nicéphore Niépce
Anonyme / Combier Imprimerie Mâcon, Une rue de Blida, vers 1950 © musée Nicéphore Niépce
Anonyme / Combier Imprimerie Mâcon, Une rue de Blida, vers 1950 © musée Nicéphore Niépce

The first part of this exhibition is dedicated to a presentation of a selection of archive photographs that span from the military colonisation of Algeria to the events of the nineties. The “Algérie, clos comme on ferme un livre ? / Archives” exhibition is made up for the most part from the musée Nicéphore Niépce’s own collection. It helps us to understand the contrasted and unique situation that was the French colonisation of Algeria, through an original collection of over 130 documents that form the basis of the historical premise.

Too far, too near, France never knows how to approach Algeria and this is more than evident in photography. There is no end to the images of the country; home-produced images are another question. Here, as elsewhere, photography is a question of viewpoint. The early images are military, depicting the colonial troops. The shots in the early albums paint a picture of the pacifying and emancipating role played by France, France the great. The strictness and serenity incarnated by the mehara  and colonial doctor.
 At the time, military men liked to depict themselves as ethnologists, geographers. But the pacifier was above all shown to be a town builder; they « built roads, drained swamps, put down the indestructible foundations of our France  d’Afrique  »: Marshall Franchet d’Espèrey.

In that which is nothing but a succession of changing backdrops, of rivalling tribes, the French soldier unified and transformed a country divided. From the green reefs of the Constatine cornice to the dunes of the desert, to the fertile plants of the Mitidja, photographers actively participated in the myth of the « Nouvelle France ». They churned out contrasting images and forced light into the shadow of the Kasbah, foisting the modern on to the picturesque.

This old country, thanks to the coloniser, went back to its Mediterranean roots. The archaeology and photography remind us of other origins than Islam. Guides, brochures and books endlessly tell is of its classical heritage, this shared past that unites both sides of the Mediterranean. Photographic publications consolidate the idea of a greco-latin culture that predates Islam and shows statues of Bacchus, Esculape, theatres and temples in ruins.

In the end, this astute but fragile mish-mash must give way to local colour.
 The colour photographs in surreal colours depict a generous and orientalist Algeria; oases and palm trees on the edges of the deserts and dunes; a desert peppered with extras from adventure films. It was the time of the French Foreign Legion, the goumier, heart-felt, honest characters as opposed to the image of the petty criminal hidden in the depths of the Kasbah.
 Here, in the wandering side streets, there lived a world we know exists but that managed to escape the eye of the photographer. The small people of Algeria are summed up in a few stereotypes; the underage prostitute, the beggar child, white, veiled shapes fleeing the photographer’s gaze. The Algerian city, with the picturesque removed, regains its element of danger and affirms its resistance to « civilisation ». But the modernity and fortune of Algeria were written by French hands. The 1950’s postcard proclaims as much. Everything that was done, produced, built on this land was due to the colonisers, not the natives. The «Nouvelle France» so praised in images is but a carbon copy of the motherland.

Chapter by chapter, the illustrated history of Algeria took a collection of beautiful images from photography, well chosen documents that, by hiding the contradictions of colonisation, contributed to the general ignorance surrounding the legitimate claims of the Algerian people.
 The images transmitted by wire were to be a violent reminder to metropolitan France of the complex and brutal nature of colonisation.
 Under the watch of the foreign press, demonstrations in support of French Algeria degenerated when partisans of the F.L.N called for a Muslim Algeria. Things accelerated and shifted in the war that did not speak its name and chose its image: « felon » generals, bloody faces in the streets of Paris, the fleeting silhouette of Krim Belkacem in Evian, the ceasefire, independence. Images of joyful crowds.
 So, is the chapter closed as the Algerian national anthem claims?
 A collection of ID shots of civilians who disappeared in the nineties call this into question.
 Independence lasted for a moment, it was but a prelude to other, equally bloody battles, a continuity of the violence meted out to the Algerian people, from the « expeditionary colonisers » of General Bugeaud and the carnage of Sétif to the massacre of the harkis.

« Clos comme on ferme un livre? », a history in pictures that isn’t one; a collection of shortcuts, disjunctions, choices made to open another book of images.

François Cheval
 Curator of the musée Nicéphore Niépce

Anonyme, La grande prière – lecture du Coran, vers 1920, Chromolithographie © musée Nicéphore Niépce
Anonyme, La grande prière – lecture du Coran, vers 1920, Chromolithographie © musée Nicéphore Niépce
Anonyme / Agence France Presse, Des partisans du F.L.N. groupés aux environs d’Alger, 13 décembre 1960 © musée Nicéphore Niépce
Anonyme / Agence France Presse, Des partisans du F.L.N. groupés aux environs d’Alger, 13 décembre 1960 © musée Nicéphore Niépce
Anonyme / Associated Press, vers 1960 © musée Nicéphore Niépce
Anonyme / Associated Press, vers 1960 © musée Nicéphore Niépce
musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
Erwin Blumenfeld Evelyn Tripp, en robe Sargent de Christian Dior Variante de la photographie parue dans Vogue US du 1er novembre 1949 © The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld, collection Henry et Yorick Blumenfeld
Erwin Blumenfeld Evelyn Tripp, en robe Sargent de Christian Dior Variante de la photographie parue dans Vogue US du 1er novembre 1949 © The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld, collection Henry et Yorick Blumenfeld

Studio Blumenfeld

New York, 1941-1960
16 06 ... 23 09 2012

It was in the United States after the war, in a context of economic growth and a buoyant and expanding press, that Erwin Blumenfeld’s humorous, inventive and personal work (1897-1969) flowered. Vogue , Harper’s Bazaar , Collier’s , Cosmopolitan , Life , Look , all of the big American fashion magazines hired him regularly over a fifteen year period, a photographer that Alexander Liberman admiringly called « the most graphic and rooted in art ».
For this exhibition, the photographer’s sheet-films that, sixty years on, have deteriorated for the most part, have been restored by the laboratory of the musée Nicéphore Niépce. A digital restoration process was used In order to give the photographs their original colours. The exhibition includes over one hundred modern-day shots, original press cuttings and vintage black and white photographs, and will showcase the reality of this little-known workshop collection of fashion and advertising photography.

Three years after his arrival in New York, Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) is, in 1944, the most famous photographer around. According to the New York Times , he is « an outstanding leader in imaginative photography », and one of the highest paid ! This seemingly remarkable success story proves, if necessary, that post-WWII photography was an alliance of creativity and economic factors.

Erwin Blumenfeld owes this american fame, to his fashion and advertizing photographs, that he does in New York in the 40’s and 50’s, in his studio located 222 Central Park South, but also to his appearance as a cultured European artist : the « infinite absorption and love of craft »* (Harper’s Bazaar , 1941) which he brings to photography.

If the European biography of Erwin Blumenfeld is well known ; the wanderings of a creative artist, a jew from Berlin, his beginnings in Amsterdam (1930), his founding experience with the parisian avant-garde, little is known about his american period and the activity of his New York studio. Conversely to the accepted idea, it is as early as 1936, that he starts to work in fashion photography. After fleeing occupied France (1941), and settling in the United States, fashion photography will become his main activity. He is immediately hired by Harper’s Bazaar , before starting a long collaboration with Vogue .

This period indicates an unmistakable breaking point in Blumenfeld’s career, he is obliged for a while to harness his creativity. The European photographer, close to the avant-gardes, seeking to explore the photographic medium, takes on the position of a studio professional, submitting himself to orders and to commercial aims. Other reality of the shootings, each sitting now requires between 10 and 40 different exposures, with an 8X10 inch Deardorff, a subtle preparation of light effects, make-up, props, accessories, etc.

Drawn between his desire to express himself as an artist and the economic constraints, Erwin Blumenfeld states that he is capable of « smuggling art  » into commercial ventures. The relationship based on trust that had been established before the war with the art directors of the magazine Vu , Alexei Brodovitch, and Alexander Liberman, will allow him to keep some degrees of freedom and creativity. Things are not that easy when beauty products, clothes, accessories, represent the everyday studio production.

Fashion photography is booming, and the magazines are prosperous, in a victorious America, proudly showing its values. The advertising budgets, the number of orders, the level of his retribution, increase likewise. But dissatisfied, proud and sarcastic, Erwin Blumenfeld takes hold of the weaknesses of the projects, to better dynamite them with multiple references. He does not hesitate to draw from his stock images, from art history, or from new techniques to better hide the product’s commonness. He also knows how to utilize his graphic talent, his interest for the shape of clothes and his fascination for women’s bodies to show not only texture or form, but also to indicate the geometric and color potentialities.

Even though the american period made the reputation of Erwin Blumenfeld, it appears finally paradoxical, nostalgic and gay, fertile and repetitive, inventive and sly ! It shall remain in his œuvre above all as the moment of discovery, of fascination and of empowerement of color. Intrigued by this novel language, encouraged by Vogue , Erwin Blumenfeld will soon play with Kodachrome. He finds the way to quote the great painters, his role models, Manet, Vermeer… Also provocative, he likes to oppose the conventional codes, choosing unexpected colors, at the edge of bad taste, thereby participating by this transgression, to the color-identity of his country of adoption.

“Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris; Europe was a renunciation, a wound never healed. Here is an uncommon case: a photographer who does not want to turn back towards old Europe, guilty of having betrayed its ideals of humanity and beauty, and who suffers from an incurable pain, the lack of culture and American “synchronism”. He who believed in the merits of art, in the avant-gardes, has no remaining ambition than to stifle this daily triviality. E. Blumenfeld scatters footnotes on his kodachromes and ektachromes, constant reminders of a past that he cannot bury, which cannot part with him. Nothing new since his forced departure from France, the aesthetics remains unchanging: solid and full of nuances, somewhat charming, but always precise. He makes his two routes agree, modernity and classicism, meaning playfulness and rigor. The daring of his poses and his framing balances the precision of the composition. Finally, he does not care about the object of the assignment, the clothes. He redirects this object. Here is the pleasure. And to this end, no effort is ever in vain in the studio. The will to escape from the daily grind, grey and morose, pointless, runs across the photograph. One must leave behind the smell of reality, of its appearance, its traps. Only the conjunction of will and libido, united in art can spare us from the monotony and the baseness of feelings. The joy of color stems from high expectations. A demand that never ceased to grow for an image that could suffer no fault at the risk of barrenness.”

François Cheval
Extract from the preface to the book published in tandem with the exhibition:
« Blumenfeld Studio, Couleur, New York, 1941-1960 », Steidl, 2012

musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
Michel Campeau, In the darkroom (2005-2009) Sans titre 0111, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada © Michel Campeau / courtesy galerie Simon Blais / Adagp, Paris 2012
Michel Campeau, In the darkroom (2005-2009) Sans titre 0111, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada © Michel Campeau / courtesy galerie Simon Blais / Adagp, Paris 2012

Michel Campeau

In the darkroom

16 06 ... 16 09 2012

Michel Campeau Série Dans la chambre noire (2005-2009) Sans titre 0310, Montréal, Québec © Michel Campeau / courtesy galerie Simon Blais / Adagp, Paris 2012
Michel Campeau Série Dans la chambre noire (2005-2009) Sans titre 0310, Montréal, Québec © Michel Campeau / courtesy galerie Simon Blais / Adagp, Paris 2012
Michel Campeau Série Dans la chambre noire (2005-2009) Sans titre 7987, Montréal, Québec © Michel Campeau / courtesy galerie Simon Blais / Adagp, Paris 2012
Michel Campeau Série Dans la chambre noire (2005-2009) Sans titre 7987, Montréal, Québec © Michel Campeau / courtesy galerie Simon Blais / Adagp, Paris 2012

At a time when digital has definitively replaced film in photography, Michel Campeau (b. 1948) went off to look for the last darkrooms that exist in the world.
From 2005 to 2009, he inventoried and photographed these soon to disappear places like an anthropologist. He thus documented the end of a technology, of an era that built a part of photographic history. He revealed the rooms, showing significant fragments, using flashes and playing with colour to highlight the aesthetic value of these objects worn with use.

Photography was invented in the name of progress and has never stopped evolving, perfecting itself. Today, digital technology has taken over from film photography. Printers, ink cartridges, computers and software for retouching photographs have little by little replaced the development laboratory, its inactinic lighting, its chemistry… The developer-craftsman has been replaced by the computer pixel specialist.

Like anything that is destined to disappear, darkrooms give off a perfume of nostalgia. The darkrooms that Michel Campeau found all over the world are the quasi-archaeological vestiges of an era that built photography. The artist reveals both the beauty and the triviality; he shows the mechanical aspect as well as the DIY aspect. He explores what appears to be a jumble, but that makes sense only to the initiated. Armed with a digital camera, thumbing his nose at the conservative defenders of traditional film photography, he captures the obsolescence of these places, the sheen on the objects that makes their aesthetic. He frames, gets closer, flashes and in so doing, highlights unexpected shapes and colours, at times close to the abstract.
A photographic object, the series documents the history of photography.

Michel Campeau Série Dans la chambre noire (2005-2009) Sans titre 7524, Niamey, Niger © Michel Campeau / courtesy galerie Simon Blais / Adagp, Paris 2012
Michel Campeau Série Dans la chambre noire (2005-2009) Sans titre 7524, Niamey, Niger © Michel Campeau / courtesy galerie Simon Blais / Adagp, Paris 2012

Michel Campeau / Biography:

Michel Campeau’s work extends over the past four decades of contemporary photography. Expressing a concern for interiorization at odds with the medium and breaking with the formal conventions of the documentary, it explores photography’s subjective, narrative and ontological dimensions.

In 1994, Michel Campeau won Japan’s Higashikawa Overseas Photographer Award. Two years later, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography organized a retrospective of his work entitled Eloquent Images: Photographs, 1971–1996. In 2004, Plein sud, Longueuil, Québec’s contemporary art exhibition centre, presented the works of his series Arborescences. Beauté et paradoxes. Published in 2007, the monograph Darkroom was the first in a collection edited by Martin Parr for Nazraeli Press; this project was the subject of a feature article in the New York magazine Aperture, and the photograph that graced that issue’s cover is available through the Aperture Foundation’s Limited Edition Photographs program. Martin Parr also selected his works on the obsolescence of the darkroom for inclusion in the May 2008 exhibition New Typologies, presented at the New York Photo Festival in Brooklyn. These same works will be on view in July 2010 as part of the Rencontres d’Arles official exhibition program.

The recipient of numerous research and artistic creation grants, Michel Campeau was awarded the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec’s Jean-Paul-Riopelle Career Grant for 2009–2010. In 2010, he received the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography given by the Canada Council for the Arts. His work has been the topic of many monographs and articles, and is included in major museum and institutional collections. He is represented by Montréal’s Galerie Simon Blais.

Michel Campeau was born in 1948. He lives and works in Montréal, Québec, Canada.

musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
Charlotte Perriand Détail du Parthénon, 1933 © Photo Charlotte Perriand, ADAGP Paris 2012
Charlotte Perriand Détail du Parthénon, 1933 © Photo Charlotte Perriand, ADAGP Paris 2012

Charlotte Perriand, 

Photography for another world

18 02 … 20 05 2012

Charlotte Perriand La Cité de refuge de l’Armée du salut en construction, Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret. Charlotte Perriand, Equipement intérieur. Paris, vers 1931. © Charlotte Perriand, ADAGP Paris 2012
Charlotte Perriand La Cité de refuge de l’Armée du salut en construction, Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret. Charlotte Perriand, Equipement intérieur. Paris, vers 1931. © Charlotte Perriand, ADAGP Paris 2012
Charlotte Perriand Homme assis sur un muret, vers 1936 © Charlotte Perriand, ADAGP Paris 2012
Charlotte Perriand Homme assis sur un muret, vers 1936 © Charlotte Perriand, ADAGP Paris 2012

« Photography for another world » presents experimental photography by Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999), better known for her work as a designer and as a collaborator of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret.
As early as 1928, Charlotte Perriand was using photography as working tool in furniture design, then as a source of inspiration for her research into shapes and materials… She is one of the first to have used photomontage on a grand scale in interior design. She was hired by the Front populaire to create huge political and educational murals where she used her innate sense of narrative to depict social change and manifested her commitment to left-wing politics.
The exhibition at the musée Nicéphore Niépce is dedicated entirely to her photographic work. It includes a number of original prints, some reconstitutions of her friezes to scale and a series entitled « L’Art brut ».

The twenties saw a change in the status the photography as it came to incarnate the very essence of modernity. The avant-garde took it over and worked it over to create a new artistic language, banishing the picturesque forever in favour of graphic novelty. The era was fascinated by technique and the machine. The world was being rebuilt, but according to rational rules in order to attain perfection.
It was in this « state of mind », that of the « aesthetic engineer », that Charlotte Perriand made her first pieces of furniture. As a young designer and architect who worked with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret from 1928, she used photography intuitively, recording shapes that caught her eye: the metallic structure of a bridge, the netting of fishing net, a pebble, all became sources of inspiration for the design of her chairs, tables and shelves.

Charlotte Perriand Benne pour transporter du sable, vers 1934 © Charlotte Perriand, ADAGP Paris 2012
Charlotte Perriand Benne pour transporter du sable, vers 1934 © Charlotte Perriand, ADAGP Paris 2012
Charlotte Perriand Grès sur le sable, vers 1935 © Charlotte Perriand, ADAGP Paris 2012
Charlotte Perriand Grès sur le sable, vers 1935 © Charlotte Perriand, ADAGP Paris 2012

Charlotte Perriand maintained a mystical relationship with nature, a carnal relationship with raw matter. In the thirties, she collected objects found in nature in the company of the artist Fernand Léger: bones, rocks, pieces of wood whose beauty caught her eye, « objects with a poetic reaction » according to Le Corbusier. « Our backpacks were filled with treasures: pebbles, lumps of old shoes, bits of raggedy wood, shaped, sculpted by the sea (…) it was what we referred to as l’art brut » . By photographing objects on a neutral background, Charlotte Perriand highlights the purity of the lines and the power of the materials. « L’Art brut » espoused a belief in the primal beauty of the world and modified modern man’s relationship to what can be felt.

Charlotte Perriand travelled around Europe accumulating images that constituted a repertoire of shapes and ideas. At first an adept of starkness and the aesthetic power of the functionalist architecture dear to Le Corbusier, in 1935 Charlotte Perriand shifted toward a functionalism of circumstance, to a modernity that was anchored in the human, taking poetic, geographical and cultural realities into account.
Adapting architectural vernacular to the countryman’s way of life was just as interesting to her as the monuments of ancient Greece. She went against the tide of the contemporary avant-garde in considering man, whose postures and attitudes she observed, as the basis of all reflection on architecture. The singularity of her work comes from the way in which she took the human into account; by observing life and nature, notably through the photographic lens, making architecture serve the body.

This humanism naturally led her to militate against the plagues of her time: unhealthy living conditions in cities, poverty… Photography enabled her to express her political convictions. « One can make photography say anything, by cutting, shifting it around; it is an accessible, comprehensible and effective realist form of expression. » She innovated by creating huge photographic murals from photomontages. To support her militant stance, she used her own photographs but also those from press agencies or photographer friends such as François Kollar or Nora Dumas.
Her mural entitled « La Grande Misère de Paris » created in 1936 for the Salon des arts ménagers de Paris caused a scandal a few months before the Front Populaire came to power. Over a space of almost 60 m², Charlotte Perriand denounced the deplorable living and health conditions in Paris. Completely ignoring the laws of perspective, she overlapped images and points of view. The accompanying texts and figures supported her photographic stance.
* [La Grande Misère de Paris was destroyed at the end of the 1936 exhibition, but 80% of it has been reconstituted by the laboratory at the musée Nicéphore Niépce to the original dimensions using original prints and negatives. The colouring and insertion of typography were done by the team at the Zurich Design Museum. ]

The Front populaire commissioned other murals from her to promote the reforms of agricultural policy. Charlotte Perriand created a mural for the waiting room of the Agricultural ministry in 1936 and the Pavillon du Ministère de l’Agriculture in 1937.
The accumulated images glorify agricultural and industrial France, a political sign of the wish to unite the peasant and working classes in the same struggle for progress.
Charlotte Perriand’s photomontages illustrated man’s place in the city and the world of work, denouncing the injustices and ravages of capitalism and the absence of social policy in the country. Her photography became the visual tool of a documented discourse aimed at the masses. The stance was in line with an era that magnified industry, rural life, technology and nature in one felled swoop.

musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
Raphaël Dallaporta Fragile, 2010 «Quatre humeurs», Bile noire © Raphaël Dallaporta
Raphaël Dallaporta Fragile, 2010 «Quatre humeurs», Bile noire © Raphaël Dallaporta

Raphaël Dallaporta

Observation

18 02 … 20 05 2012

Raphaël Dallaporta’s (b. 1980) work deals with life’s fragility while at the same time analysing the perversity of society. This young photographer’s subtle and intriguing work appeals to the spectator’s curiosity and sensibility.
« Observation » displays a body of work that doesn’t shy away from meaningful objects such as simple industrial items. But make no mistake, this detachment, this false objectivity is there to show the limits of photography and its overblown aestheticism.
This first solo exhibition by the artist in a French museum will present the series « Antipersonnel » (Antipersonnel), « Esclavage domestique » (Domestic slavery), « Fragile » (Fragile), and « Ruine » (Ruin).

Raphaël Dallaporta’s atypical approach to photography places his work on the border between conceptual art and documentary reportage. He is the opposite of a solitary artist, as he regularly collaborates with other professionals that enable him to enter other unknown or forbidden worlds.
His work is the fruit of his collaboration with military engineers from Angers, lawyers, a professor from the coroner’s office in Garches or archaeologists…
Each image is created according to a strict protocol that blends the frontal and the neutral working together to decontextualise the object represented.

Antipersonnel, 2004
Unknown objects seem to emerge from the darkness. The legend quickly informs us that they are anti-personnel mines. Raphaël Dallaporta deals with the object reproduced to scale and lets us imagine the consequences of its existence. There are no bloody reportage images to illustrate the mutilations caused by these devices. The photographer presents us with contemporary still lifes that appear inoffensive but that tend to be aestheticised by photographic techniques all the better to erase the actual use of the object.

Raphaël Dallaporta  Esclavage Domestique, 2006 © Raphaël Dallaporta
Raphaël Dallaporta Esclavage Domestique, 2006 © Raphaël Dallaporta

Domestic Slavery, 2006
Cold, distant images of building facades are associated with text. The narratives are written by Ondine Millot to describe the events that took place at the exact address of the buildings in the photographs. The spectator comes to understand that the series deals with an often undocumented consequence of human trafficking: modern slavery.
The images force us to come to terms with the upsetting reality that is hidden behind the ordinary facades. Raphaël Dallaporta denounces unbearable situations where one human being reduces another to the status of thing, and gives it depth through the distance of the photographs and his refusal to sensationalise.

Raphaël Dallaporta  Fragile, 2010 © Raphaël Dallaporta
Raphaël Dallaporta Fragile, 2010 © Raphaël Dallaporta

Fragile, 2010
Raphaël Dallaporta photographs organs, like the encyclopaedic colour plates for an anatomy class. The legend, again, explains the origins of these silent images. The organ represented is not the issue; the reason for its presence on the slab is the issue. The apparent neutrality of the shot, according to a strict protocol (frontal shot, on a black background enabling the strong lighting of the « subject »), isolates each fragment of the body as a clue that enables to determine the cause of death. These relics of flesh and bone have a real role to play. But the way they are shot lends them a metaphysical and philosophical dimension that reminds us of life’s ephemeral nature and human vulnerability.

Raphaël Dallaporta  Ruine (Saison 1), 2011 Chesme Shafa, rempart au pied du Kouh-i-Albrouz  période achamenide, (6e-4e siecle av J.C.) Province de Balkh, Afghanistan © Raphaël Dallaporta
Raphaël Dallaporta Ruine (Saison 1), 2011 Chesme Shafa, rempart au pied du Kouh-i-Albrouz période achamenide, (6e-4e siecle av J.C.) Province de Balkh, Afghanistan © Raphaël Dallaporta

Ruin, Season 1, 2011
In the autumn of 2010, Raphaël Dallaporta took part in an archaeological mission in the Bactriane region in Afghanistan, scene of Alexander the Great’s mythical conquest. Using a drone he designed himself, he took aerial photographs of endangered or heretofore unknown archaeological sites in a country at war. The remote controlled device was timed to take photos of unrivalled precision every five seconds. The way the images are put together with their voluntarily asymmetrical contours depict these inaccessible monuments and places at their best. The most cutting-edge technology reveals the artist’s themes – destruction, the precariousness of things. It brings to light that which was and is no longer. Is this not the very definition of all photography?

All of Raphaël Dallaporta’s work points towards the same conclusion: photography doesn’t say anything; it records a shape and documents the invisible. A modern medium for traditional vanities, it enables the artist to subtly evoke the fragility of life, the violence and the vices of contemporary society.

This exhibition is produced in collaboration with the Gwin Zegal center for art and research.
Curators: Raphaël Dallaporta and Jérôme Sother

musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
Yuki Onodera 12 Speed CO-04 2008 © Yuki Onodera
Yuki Onodera 12 Speed CO-04 2008 © Yuki Onodera

Yuki Onodera

Gravity-defying photography

15 10 2011 … 22 01 2012

Yuki Onodera Eleventh Finger No.01 2006 © Yuki Onodera
Yuki Onodera Eleventh Finger No.01 2006 © Yuki Onodera
Yuki Onodera Clothes No.45 1994 © Yuki Onodera
Yuki Onodera Clothes No.45 1994 © Yuki Onodera

The photographic universe of the Japanese artist Yuki Onodera (b. 1962) shows a pronounced taste for all that floats, flies and defies gravity. In order to shoot these images, the artist uses all types of techniques including collages and superimpositions. Each shot is the result of tiny, voluntary shifts inserted into the information circuit. Yuki Onodera thus manages to reach another level of reality, the issue of perception constituting the very essence of her approach.
The exhibition « La photographie en apesanteur » (Gravity-defying photography) at the musée Nicéphore Niépce is the first ever retrospective of Yuki Onodera’s work in France. It presents a selection of almost seventy photographs from fifteen series of pieces by the artist between 1991 and the present day. An original piece specially created for this exhibition will pay tribute to Nicéphore Niépce.

The most considerable event that occurs in this photography is its immobility. From one series to the next, we gradually come to realise that this visual universe does not move, it floats.
Fascinated as we are by our own productions we live with the idea of a permanent and uninterrupted dynamism of the system of objects. Everything is arranged and ordered, classified and posed in a vision of history as a continuous movement. This shift from a world thought to be active and logical to a static and irrational world, implies a refusal of the indicial vision of photography in favour of poetic fiction.
To tell the truth, by affirming that objects themselves have no dynamic, that humans are also fictional, constructed realities, Yuki Onodera brings us back to a pre-logical thought and supposes the abandonment of all stories, of history itself.

It would be paradoxical if the objects were to have a history in a world with no history. In this space, where time and temporality have been banished, there can be no room for geometry. Only a few sophisticated shapes remain in this illusionist space, substances overcharged with energy, stripped of time-span and apparently without any goal… This world does not know the value of use and the value of exchange. The reason for objects is no longer linked to their function but to the upheaval of their use. They expose themselves, real. However, they proclaim their absence from the known world and take on a poetic physique, vectors of irradiated light and unfathomable signs.

We have gone beyond the photographic. Here, the interior of these beings-things-images, to the sharpest degree of detail, obeys a demand for intelligibility that we are not in a position to understand. The order of the world, both continuous and discontinuous is a mystery that is constantly being rejected. Bodies go crazy, limbs multiply. Man loses sight of himself as a constellation. Objects float above the ground. Mystical beings and objects that mutate outside themselves. From now on, we will speak of phenomena. While objects levitate, constrained faces in ecstatic trances are not freed from their weight. Photography plays with the laws of gravity. By inverting the Casimir effect, Yuki Onodera thinks she can command forces that are so repulsive that they can curve light…
In short, what forces are stronger than gravity and wring reality’s neck? Photography is openly false in terms of perception, in the transformation of clues that shows it to be more adapted to survival than an exact, absurd analysis of a situation.
Fiction is a chimera and is conceived as a particular incitement, an urge to take in a multiplicity of improbable worlds. The apparent absurdity of the images activates stimuli that go down neuronal paths that seem to have lost their way in the optical system.
The repeated manipulations fool the spectator’s visual system, leading it to stray from reality. The optical constructions no longer integrate themselves in the vast store of images, in the reference system incorporated in our world experience, they become creators. By moving away from the real, Yuki Onodera’s photographs redefine the limits of the known. The being-image and the object-image become one and are shot through by uninterrupted flows of energy and signs. The mystery, the very basis of the work, doesn’t ask to be solved.
The feeling of incongruity that inhabits Yuki Onodera’s work, the value she attaches to the photography’s powers of creation call us to question what we see and how it is made. The very titles of the series: C.V.N.I, P.N.I, Watch your joint, Transvest, Liquid, tv and insect; shows us a willingness to deliberately blur the issue, an obvious taste for the labyrinthine. The paradox of the energy-filled darkness of an image that excludes brightness to preserve photographic originality, a gift made to the onlooker who knows how to look, to contemplate. At this point, the work, that borders on grandiloquent, retains the humility necessary, an essential condition to exist in mankind’s real time and space.

Yuki Onodera Look out the window No.03 2000 © Yuki Onodera
Yuki Onodera Look out the window No.03 2000 © Yuki Onodera
Yuki Onodera Transvest Sandy 2004 © Yuki Onodera
Yuki Onodera Transvest Sandy 2004 © Yuki Onodera
musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
André Steiner Lily et André, 1933 © Nicole Steiner-Bajolet
André Steiner Lily et André, 1933 © Nicole Steiner-Bajolet

André Steiner,
Love and photography
15 10 2011 … 22 01 2012

This exhibition explores the field of the « Nouvelle Vision » of the 1930s, presenting sixty-six original and personal photographs by André Steiner (1901-1978), for the most part unseen until now. These biographical images show his idyllic intimacy with his wife Léa – known as Lily – and their daughter Nicole. They prove that Steiner took the photography of the intimate family circle as an opportunity and an attempt at intellectual and artistic expression.

André Steiner was a Hungarian Jew who came to Paris with his young wife Lily after eight years in Vienna. He was a qualified engineer and wanted to make it as a photographer in the bubbling city, home of the avant-garde.
His self-portraits show a strange absent stare, internalising everything, making him seem strong and determined. He remained apart from the Hungarian artistic community in Paris on purpose and his photography was a personal and solitary act he considered to be inextricably linked with the technical aspect, scientific research and the idea of an aesthetic adventure. He was a « technician for whom all photos were above all a question of measure and precision». André Steiner cleaved himself to the rhythm of his time with a faith in science that never left him.

The inter-war years was a time that favoured outdoor living, camping, physical exercise, and clean living. After the carnage of the First World War, art, politics and medicine came together to promote healthy living carried by the vogue for water and snow sports. In Art et Médecine , a modern photography magazine in the November 1934 issue it was deemed that « there is no better aesthetic master than water to work muscles and sculpt flesh ». The cult of the body was everywhere. The magazine VU provided the propaganda for this way of life and often called on André Steiner to illustrate sport and dance revealing their vital energy.

The body, the nude, was the great passion of André Steiner, and not only in photography. As a young man he was an accomplished sportsman. Family documents show that he met Léa at the age of thirteen at the Hakoah, Vienna’s Jewish sports circle. André was one of the trainers of the prestigious swim team Léa belonged to. To see the photos of the young girl in Vienna and those of Lily as a woman in Paris, is to realise the level of metamorphosis a body can reach and what goes on underneath. André Steiner sculpted his own body and contributed to the shaping of his wife’s body. He made them and their anatomies THE subject.

At the start of the fifties, Steiner outlined his conception of the nude and the model. The nude is a piece of fiction « suggested by the operator… The main quality of the model is to lend themselves as a disarticulated puppet, in order to fill up a space that is sometimes cut through by shadows, sometimes exaggerated by too much light… ».
The nudes were perhaps a cold affirmation of what the world should be but the portraits of Lily are unavoidably expressions of the idea we may have of real happiness.

André Steiner used his love for Lily to the extent that from 1928 to the moment of their split in 1938, he was incapable of separating the creation from the real. Like all of the photographers of the « Nouvelle Vision », such as Jean Moral with Juliette or Man Ray with Lee Miller, Steiner turned his partner into the perfect model.

The musée Nicéphore Niépce and the Editions Le Bec en l’Air are publishing a book in tandem with this exhibition:
André Steiner « Ce qu’on n’a pas fini d’aimer »,
Text by François Cheval and Arnaud Cathrine,
144 pages, 100 black and white photographs,
isbn : 978-2-916073-71-2
32 €

André Steiner Lily et Nicole 1934 © Nicole Steiner-Bajolet
André Steiner Lily et Nicole 1934 © Nicole Steiner-Bajolet
André Steiner Lily et Nicole 1936 © Nicole Steiner-Bajolet
André Steiner Lily et Nicole 1936 © Nicole Steiner-Bajolet
André Steiner Lily, Hongrie 1934 © Nicole Steiner-Bajolet
André Steiner Lily, Hongrie 1934 © Nicole Steiner-Bajolet
André Steiner Lily 1936 © Nicole Steiner-Bajolet
André Steiner Lily 1936 © Nicole Steiner-Bajolet
André Steiner Lily et André 1933 © Nicole Steiner-Bajolet
André Steiner Lily et André 1933 © Nicole Steiner-Bajolet
musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
Anne Pery Sans titre, New York, Septembre 2001 © A/F/M Pery
Anne Pery Sans titre, New York, Septembre 2001 © A/F/M Pery

Anne Pery
Chuchotements / whispers / szept
15 10 2011 … 22 01 2012

Anne Pery Sans titre, 1997 – 1998 © A/F/M Pery
Anne Pery Sans titre, 1997 – 1998 © A/F/M Pery
Anne Pery Sans titre, 1997 – 1998 © A/F/M Pery
Anne Pery Sans titre, 1997 – 1998 © A/F/M Pery

Anne Pery (1973-2003) was discovered by the collector Bernard Lamarche-Vadel. She accumulated images; she was never without her camera. Anne Pery fed off the in-between, producing fragmentary landscapes and portions of bodies. She was in New York in 2001 for the attack on the World Trade Center, and photographed the streets where the patriotism of a population shone through a multitude of flags. The museum proposes an overview of her little seen work which was donated to the Museum in 2008 by her family.

Anne Pery’s work is based on what she considered to be a form of « visual indiscretion », an « urgent link to detail ». She captured tiny scraps of the world around her, photographing them as they seemed to reveal everything. She thought she could transform her uncertainties into certainties through pictures.

As a young graduate of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles, Anne Pery got to know Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, art critic and collector. He noticed the originality of her work and selected extracts of it for the exhibition / installation  «L’enfermement photographique » (Photographic lockdown), presented at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie during the winter of 1998-1999. Her encounter with Bernard Lamarche-Vadel was to become a turning point in Anne Pery’s professional career. Beyond their evident intellectual common ground, they were to become close friends. Their exchanges brought her to realise the need to reflect on an artistic project and to show her work while up until then the only audience for her work was herself.

Anne Pery’s early photographic research examined her own questions about the gap between the imagined and the real. « Does what I see exist or is it the fruit of my imagination? ». The shot renders the impression, the visual feeling authentic. But she also cast doubt on the subject represented by a fragmentary approach, where the detail became an object in itself. The close framing disconnects certain elements from their context and gives them a new existence. The paws of a cat become worrying claws, the face of a friend transforms into a serene landscape.

Anne Pery Sans titre, 1999-2003 © A/F/M Pery
Anne Pery Sans titre, 1999-2003 © A/F/M Pery
Anne Pery Sans titre, New York, Septembre 2001 © A/F/M Pery
Anne Pery Sans titre, New York, Septembre 2001 © A/F/M Pery
Anne Pery Sans titre, New York, Septembre 2001 © A/F/M Pery
Anne Pery Sans titre, New York, Septembre 2001 © A/F/M Pery
musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
Jean-Luc Moulene Sans Titre (1/3) 1988 © Jean-Luc Moulène / Cnap / Adagp, Paris 2011
Jean-Luc Moulene Sans Titre (1/3) 1988 © Jean-Luc Moulène / Cnap / Adagp, Paris 2011

Abolishing myths,
French photography (1970-2000)
from the collections of the
Centre national des arts plastiques
18 06 …18 09 2011

This exhibition seals a partnership between the musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône with the Centre national des arts plastiques for a long-term loan of 92 pieces from its collection. The loan will last 5 years, the pieces will enrich future temporary exhibitions and will also be constantly present in the musée Niépce’s general collections.

This summer, the museum will examine French photographic work from the seventies to the noughties with work from Jean-Marc Bustamante, Sophie Calle, Patrick Faigenbaum, Jean-Louis Garnell, Jean Le Gac, Joachim Mogarra, Jean-Luc Moulène, Marc Pataut, Sophie Ristelhueber, Eric Rondepierre and Patrick Tosani. The exhibition will cover the period where photography was finally fully recognised as a means of producing art. A period where photographers, through the photographic medium, questioned their relationship with the real, with narrative modes, and attempted to exploit the plastic and technical qualities of photography.

In the last century, at the end of the sixties, a generation of young French photographers began to question things. Though aware of the political and artistic transformations, they looked at the photography of their fathers and worried. Nothing was good enough, whatever they saw. They no longer bought into the myth of the photo journalist (Magnum, Henri Cartier-Bresson), and even less so into beautiful black and white prints in format 30/40. But they didn’t turn to painting, upturning the « humanist » (Doisneau, Izis) or neo-pictorial (Sudre…) heritage. Taking their lead from various intellectual adventures such as the New Topographics, the German schools, they became pensive, bitter and precise and decided to try to do what no one else had done: to redefine photography.
Like birds of prey, they circled over this sickly, uncertain thing intending to devour its carcass. They didn’t leave a scrap. They decried its mystique; beauty in the landscape, the truth of the clue, the permanence of the trace, etc…
They swept it all away in favour of a non-lieu, the re-evaluation of the « insignificant » and the contradictions of the world, by severely calling into question the place photography has in the world of representation.
Among these photography experts, there are those who are more involved with the political representation of the mechanical image, while others relentlessly pick at the very nature of photography. But in their work, they all attempt to renew the forms of the narrative, finally bringing it into line with the real world by resorting systematically to experimentation.
This is what the French scene that opened up in the seventies produced; giving birth to a creative power that had been underestimated for too long.

Exhibition curators :
François Cheval, Head curator at the musée Nicéphore Niépce
Pascal Beausse, Head of photography at the Centre national des arts plastiques.

musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
Karlheinz Weinberger © The estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zurich
Karlheinz Weinberger © The estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zurich

Karlheinz Weinberger
Rebels
18 06 …18 09 2011

Karlheinz Weinberger © The estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zurich
Karlheinz Weinberger © The estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zurich
Karlheinz Weinberger © The estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zurich
Karlheinz Weinberger © The estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zurich

Karleinz Weinberger (1921-2006), a self-taught photographer from Zurich began his artistic career in the « underground ». In 1958, he ventured off in search of the Swiss German youth that was rebelling against the country’s reigning conservatism. They invented their own codes of behaviour and Weinberger’s work reflects the gang mentality they expressed through their patched-up clothes, greatly inspired by American bikers. Rebels, the exhibition presented by the musée Nicéphore Niépce is the first solo exhibition of Karlheinz Weinberger’s work in France.
His work is gaining recognition toady and he has recently been rediscovered by fashion and cinema.
Rebel Youth a book of his work was published this year by Rizzoli in the U.S. and is prefaced by the director John Waters.

The work of Karlheinz Weinberger (1921 – 2006) presents a vision of sixties Swiss youth that is far from the usual clichés one expects from Switzerland. He was self taught and began taking photographs under the alias “Jim” in the fifties for the magazine Der Kreis , published by the gay club of the same name in Zurich.

In 1958, he made friends with a young hoodlum who introduced him to the youth scene that was rebelling against the establishment and the accepted norms of the bourgeoisie. Weinberger produced raw, realistic shots of their black leather jackets as they took their lead from America, Elvis and the films of James Dean. He studied them with curiosity and respect like an ethnologist studying a new tribe. The youths posed proudly in front of the lens, parading the exterior signs of their rebellion : brash looks, ripped jeans barely held together, customised belt buckles and zips, gang names on their jackets… All of the shots in this show were taken in the sixties. Weinberger moved on from these early rockers to photograph Hell’s Angels and many subsequent generations of young rebels. Although a stranger to this world, he was nevertheless to become intimate with its ways.

In tandem with the Fondation Suisse pour la Photographie, Winterthur

Karlheinz Weinberger
Rebel Youth
Rizzoli International Publications, 2011
Texts: John Waters et Guy Trebay
ISBN 978-0-8478-3612-3
Price : 45 euros

Karlheinz Weinberger © The estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zurich
Karlheinz Weinberger © The estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zurich
Karlheinz Weinberger © The estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zurich
Karlheinz Weinberger © The estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zurich
Karlheinz Weinberger © The estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zurich
Karlheinz Weinberger © The estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zurich
musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
Anonyme – Etats-Unis années 1930 Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce
Anonyme – Etats-Unis années 1930 Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce

Family albums,
Images of intimacy
18 06 …18 09 2011

Anonyme – France 1890-1912 Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce
Anonyme – France 1890-1912 Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce
Anonyme – France  années 1930-1950 Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce
Anonyme – France années 1930-1950 Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce

Family albums are a priori insignificant objects, just like the photographs they contain. In them, we expect to find the archetypal images of family life: births, celebrations, and maybe a few trips abroad… However, if we study them more closely, the way an album is created differs greatly from one to the next, from the choice of photos to their layout, as well as the rhythm of the narration. The musée Nicéphore Niépce has taken an interest in family albums for many years and has constituted a large collection through targeted purchases and donations. In this exhibition, the museum will try to determine what makes up a family album.

Once these polymorphous objects end up in a museum, their original function ceases to exist, their meaning is lost. Even though the chain has been broken and the stories scattered, the banality of the narrative is paradoxically transformed into a mystery that we try to solve. The most everyday event exerts a fascination over the viewer that is difficult to explain. Lineage creates a visual treasure hunt that is incredibly entertaining. Sometimes history surges into the frame legitimising our curiosity. Despite the fact that we are detached from the reality of the individuals involved, our interest in these albums today is eagerly fuelled by the intimacy of the images.

The definition of the family album may be quite formal – it is an organised collection of photographs stuck on bound pages – but the object itself in its diverse forms reveals itself to be much more complex: the album is a pictorial biography. It marks an important step in the history of self-representation: it was the first opportunity afforded to people to build a personal story, in a more or less idealised manner. The personality of the biographer – the person who places the photos in the album, classifying them and giving them titles – is as such decisive even if they are not the photographer. Family albums tell the story of their author and his or her close entourage, with the aim of preserving and handing on memories.

Famille Bally – France vers 1900 Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce
Famille Bally – France vers 1900 Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce

A game of society and appearances

The first family photograph albums appeared in the 1860s. They went along with the fad for the portrait « visiting card », that members of good society had taken in bulk at the photographer’s studio to hand out to family members or social acquaintances. In the little pre-cut openings on the pages, one inserted these little card-backed portraits. The family was assembled artificially, even classified in the most conformist way possible. The narrative was limited to the more or less obvious ageing process of the protagonists, when they appeared at intervals throughout the album. They were a miniature and portable version of the gallery of paintings of ancestors reserved for the aristocracy until the advent of photography and they bore witness to the appearance of the bourgeoisie, a social class in search of recognition that happily juxtaposed portraits of “great” political or intellectual figures with their own representations.

Despite the freer format as opposed to the visiting card portraits and the changes in photographic techniques, the constitution of family albums remained a practice reserved for the elite until the start of the 20th century. The activity implied the availability of time and money, as is evident from the quality of the binding, but also the care taken with the layout of the photographs. Sometimes they were made by professional studios.

Anonyme – France 1956-1968 Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce
Anonyme – France 1956-1968 Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce

The generalisation of a practice: the shift to conformity

In the first half of the 20th century, the photograph became more a part of everyday life, becoming available to all social classes thanks to the simplification of techniques and a drop in costs. The big moments of family life were recorded by the camera and the images it produced became the guarantors of the memory of their author and his or her close family circle. The album enabled the organisation of memories, in chronological order unsurprisingly, sometimes with added notes or amusing titles. It brought the generations together artificially and froze the family structure in its pages. Photography became the proof of group cohesion.

Invariably, in the albums, we find records of weddings, baptisms, communions and other celebrations considered to be happy events. The birth of children and the first few years of their lives are also a central subject. Photography created the illusion of freezing moments that go by too quickly, while also providing proof of the growth and progress of the little ones. The family album depicted other happy moments, as insignificant as a Sunday picnic or a nap in the garden or as exceptional as a foreign trip. Some seem to be travel notebooks as they show proof of passage in dreamt-of faraway places.

Anonyme – Russie (ex. URSS) Camp de pionniers, environs de Léningrad 1937 Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce
Anonyme – Russie (ex. URSS) Camp de pionniers, environs de Léningrad 1937 Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce

Outside the family, the second circle 

Few albums go beyond this stereotypical representation of the family unit. In the conformity of these pictorial autobiographies, individuality expresses itself sometimes through the opening up to a second close circle. The author then integrates photographs of close relatives, photos of friends, work colleagues, sometimes giving them their own full album. The social link thus lost its imposed, filial aspect and revealed the aspirations and temperament of the narrator all the more clearly. The album materialised the network of affinities and complicities that each individual created around him or herself throughout a lifetime, beyond the circle imposed by the family unit.

Curators :
François Cheval, Christelle Rochette, Anne-Céline Besson, Carole Cieslar, Caroline Lossent et Emmanuelle Vieillard

In 2005, the museum also produced the documentary entitled
« Familiarités, les albums de l’amateur » (Familiarities, amateur albums)
A film gleaned and composed by Michel Frizot and Cédric de Veigy
Length 45’
DVD French / English
On sale for 14€90 in the museum shop
 

Anonyme – République populaire de Chine années 1960 Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce
Anonyme – République populaire de Chine années 1960 Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce
musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
© Antoine d’Agata / Magnum Photos
© Antoine d’Agata / Magnum Photos

Antoine d’Agata
Ice
12 02 … 15 05 2011

© Antoine d’Agata / Magnum Photos
© Antoine d’Agata / Magnum Photos
© Antoine d’Agata / Magnum Photos
© Antoine d’Agata / Magnum Photos

The photography of Antoine d’Agata is more a question of suggestion than identification, more an evocation than a representation. The fruit of his nocturnal wanderings associated with a sliver of the subconscious, thanks to psychotropic substances, the images can be out of focus, fleeting, wandering toward a dark, deep but rarely reached lyricism.
For the past ten years, Antoine d’Agata has been travelling the world, preferably at night, using his wanderings to depict a dark, tortured universe, far from reportage. He now brings us into his own off-kilter world, making us uneasy spectators.
For the past four years, the Museum has supported the work of Antoine d’Agata and has a complete collection of his most recent work. This exhibition is the result of this partnership.

My work, whether it is in journal or documentary form, is above all a shout, an instinctive, irrational, sometimes excessive but always sincere reaction to the horror all men must face.
Antoine d’Agata

Antoine d’Agata’s work can be defined as an autobiographical realisation, a personal diary.The photographer documents how he lives at the moment he is living it, all around the world.
He lets himself get caught up in a whirlwind, unaware of the consequences and risks involved which brings an incomparable reality to the instants he seizes. His choices are sub-conscious, but his obsessions are unchanging : sexuality, fear, darkness, death… He captures both ordinary and extreme experiences. The shots come from chance meetings and situations. The brutality of the form and the exaggeration of the vision oblige us to take an interest in the reality we see before us. The spectator thus moves away from his position as voyeur or consumer to share in extreme experiences and question the state of the world and himself.

Antoine d’Agata has never had so many hooks and space to establish his narrative. « Ice » is put together as a collection of all types of documents: photographs, contact sheets, letters, videos, etc. As the weeks go by other photographs and documents will be added. The exhibition is different in that it is evolving, hanging will continue throughout the entire event. This is an experimental photographic installation, spread over space and time.

In Japan or Cambodia, ghosts at the bedside, always the same girls in lugubrious brothels and everything that goes with it, that can be consumed with it, lies the dark hunt of Antoine d’Agata. It may be a hunt, but it is a compassionate one as the photographer has frequented these places since he was extremely young and has always loved the outcast.
He is one himself. And even though it all seems to repeat itself in the same scenes ad nauseam, each shot is unique, each encounter embraces the bodies, the principle of life and it’s contrary, truthfully. Faced with such an unflinching account, we hear « from afar, prolonged screams of the most poignant pain »… We, forbidden and fearful spectators, are faced with our own demons, our own configurations.
Those who take these photos as they come understand nothing, seeing only a fatal and pornographic relationship.
They are nocturnal images; they are never really in focus. Reality evaporates around the photographer and his female double. There is no backdrop; it is dark in this « huis-clos ».

Antoine d’Agata blindly searches for the sinister oracle who can tell the final truth in this theatre of cruelty in a world that is no longer vast. If he ever finds it, his story may come to an end.

Francois Cheval, Curator of the musée Nicéphore Niépce

© Antoine d’Agata / Magnum Photos
© Antoine d’Agata / Magnum Photos
© Antoine d’Agata / Magnum Photos
© Antoine d’Agata / Magnum Photos
© Antoine d’Agata / Magnum Photos
© Antoine d’Agata / Magnum Photos
© Antoine d’Agata / Magnum Photos
© Antoine d’Agata / Magnum Photos
musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone

BLV 4

Conversations between works

12 02 … 15 05 2011

Ever since 2003 when the Bernard Lamarche-Vadel collection was donated to the museum it has been the subject of study and educational experiments. The musée Nicéphore Niépce is constantly renewing its take on this collection through research and its museum-based and technological applications. (Corpus, BLV1, BLV2, BLV3, BLV4). With BLV1 we installed the collection at the heart of the museum for a first homage to the collector and the collection. BLV2 highlighted the unique relationship the collector had with death through the work of two artists he collected and who accompanied him until the end, Jean Rault and Jean-Philippe Reverdot.
 BLV3 depicted the less well-known part of the collection, his collection of photography books (1300 photography books).
 Corpus (2003-2006), reformulated in Arles for the 2010 Photography festival was a chance to renew this technological and museum-based experiment with the complete digitisation of the collections with nothing missing and no location constraints (1500 images).

Finally, BLV4 highlights the vision BLV himself had of his photography collection, its reach and its link to the history of photography and more generally the history of the arts (both literature and painting).
 So we are delving yet again into the collection, this time in small stages, taking a few major historical pieces to lead us into conversations with the whole collection of contemporary pieces.

Any collection constituted by one person over a certain period of time shows up their determinations. The over-representation of an artist or the presence of a clashing element does not create a false note.
 In Bernard Lamarche-Vadel’s collection, marked by contemporary photographers from the eighties and nineties, older photography takes up a much smaller place. However, as if he were compiling an encyclopaedia, he collected around the big historical categories: American landscapes; the portrait (the death portrait); documentary, commercial, fashion photography; pictorialist experiments; architecture; amateur photography, etc.
 So around these few, impressive historical pieces from Watkins, Abbott, Evans, Stieglitz, Kühn, Umbo, Carjat, Man Ray, Nadar and Neurdein, there is a vast collection of contemporary work that we delved into to create an « ideal » selection.
 Beyond differences of format, colour and framing, there is no gap between these chosen pieces or, if there is one, it is purely chronological. When we put them up, brought them together, we emphasised their links, with the idea of starting possible conversations.

So Carleton Watkins gets to talk to Hamish Fulton and Lewis Baltz; Umbo with Bettina Rheims and Keiichi Tahara; the pictorialist Heinrich Kühn with Paul-Armand Gette and John Coplans; Thomas Ruff with Etienne Carjat and Etienne Neurdein (19th century photographers); Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans with William Klein and Lewis Baltz; Félix Nadar with Florence Chevallier and Sophie Calle.
 Only Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage , stands alone when put beside the other pieces. It is a rare and an emblematic work in the history of photography. But conversations perhaps more in line with that history can take place: Coplans admired Watkins; Kühn worked with Stieglitz and Ruff’s German photography is linked to Umbo’s images from the thirties, etc.

Mentally, all conversations are possible, the hanging order can be mixed up and the traditional exhibition categories restored. It’s up to each spectator to make their own conversations.

Exhibition curator: Sonia Floriant

A catalogue has been published to accompany this exhibition :
Inclinations
La collection selon Bernard Lamarche-Vadel
Text: Isabelle Tessier , Danielle Robert-Guedon
François Cheval, Sonia Floriant, Michèle Chomette, Gaëtane Lamarche-Vadel
Filigranes Editions
ISBN 13 : 978-2-35046-199-1
25 €

musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
Bertrand Meunier Paysans ordinaires 2006 © Bertrand Meunier / Tendance Floue
Bertrand Meunier Paysans ordinaires 2006 © Bertrand Meunier / Tendance Floue

New frontiers

Landscapes in contemporary photography

12 02 … 15 05 2011

In the last few decades of the twentieth century, photographers took the landscape down from the pedestal on which painting had placed it. It became a question of conquered, ruined, globalised territories as opposed to the sublime, the romantic and universal beauty. The impact of humanity and industrialisation could no longer be ignored.
Taking work from Bertrand Meunier, Mario Giacomelli, Claire Chevrier and Lewis Baltz from the permanent collection, the musée Nicéphore Niépce has put together an exhibition-dossier on the theme of landscape on contemporary photography.

As far as they eye can see, building is going on. The bungalow is a land-eating cell, an insatiable beast that swallows up everything in its path but, don’t be fooled, with the poor on the left and the rich on the right. Factories are no longer content to remain in specific industrial zones.
There is no country left; there are no more « landscapes ».
We now have to choose between the megacity and the city. The rest has been conceded. Nature has become an amusement park, a sports club, a tourist reserve, a huge vegetable garden, an alibi.

In the seventies, American artists such as Lewis Baltz showed landscapes wrecked by civilisation, hybrid locations, no man’s lands on the edges of big cities. He made his point coldly, without trimmings. Contemporary landscapes are an objective representation of reality, a reality that is becoming more and more uniform regardless of where we are in the world. A reality where the only beauty can come from a shape or a colour, and no longer the subject itself.

Like Joubert, the photographer would like to see beauty. « Those who don’t see beauty are bad painters, bad friends, bad lovers. Those who don’t see beauty have not managed to raise their minds to nature or their heart to goodness ». Time has passed, the chemistry that invented the photographer has spread devastation. The curiosity that before justified his excursions and expeditions has debased places of interest, worse it has made them banal. Cities and their architecture that were so in line with his lens are disappearing from the frame by changing into megacities - these worrying growths. And photographers who supported the conversion of nature into land parcels resign themselves to recording and moralising, they have little choice.
The photographer is suspicious and circumspect when face with modernity. He no longer moves through the landscape as the pioneers did, the painters, sketchers, observers sent to frame fragments. In Yosemite Valley, the photographer faithfully accompanied the railroad company’s surveyor. With his camera on his back, he depicted the skinning of the last vestiges of the virgin world. He feigned innocence and righteousness as he participated in the preparatory inventory of the big slice up.
Later, John Ford and Ansel Adams, their tails between their legs, with their grandiose panoramic views and astonishing prints, undertook the suspension of the moment where the feeling of the immensity was in harmony with the elevation of the soul. But it was too late.
The sublime was gone and in the deserts where the fate of the landscape was played out, in Arizona, in the Sahara, in the Asian steppes, in these territories emptied of their natives, a new episode for the battle of the world-space began: the atomic race, the beginning and the end of landscape.

François Cheval, curator of the musée Nicéphore Niépce

musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone

Indochina at war,

Photographs under surveillance [1945-1954]

16 10 2010 … 16 01 2011

The exhibition « L’Indochine en guerre, des images sous contrôle [1945-1954] (Indochina at war, Photographs under surveillance [1945-1954]) » is a continuation of the approach the musée Nicéphore Niépce has taken toward war photography over the past number of years.

War and photography have been inextricably linked since the First World War The 1914-1918 war was a time of spectacular development in magazine photography (Le Miroir, L’Illustration ,…), as it was for aerial photography (1915). The conflicts that followed (the Spanish Civil War, the China-Japan war, the Second World War) saw the emergence of photo-journalism and the consolidation of army in-house photography departments.
From 1964 onwards, the American invasion of South Vietnam brought war photography to another level. However, contrary to what is commonly thought, press photographers encountered difficult situations, huge constraints and endless pressure when trying to do their job. They experienced a very short window of opportunity in which to do their job freely. Modern warfare, since Kuwait and up until today’s Iraqi and Afghan conflicts, is waged in the media and the public are used to this. Recent conflicts give the impression that war photography and coverage has only recently come under the control of the military. An analysis of French photographic production during the war in Indochina [1945-1954] proves this is far from the case.
Using publications, the French army’s photographic archives, private, and institutional sources, this exhibition will attempt to depict the conditions under which images of the conflict were produced and spread: to serve the official story, set up and controlled by the French authorities.

The exhibition will also provide unusual and confidential visions of the conflict with the work of Willy Rizzo and Werner Bischof both of whom worked for Paris-Match in Indochina, as well as the work of Raoul Coutard and Pierre Ferrari, who were members of the military and who propose another perspective from inside.

The military administration runs and controls the production and spread of all photographic images. The mythical figure of Robert Capa who died in Indochina was replaced by the ambiguous and despised image of « embedded » photographers who rely on the army to give them their itinerary and their timetable. The working conditions of photo-journalists have deteriorated beyond repair. But what appears to be a recent situation has in fact been the case since the fifties. In fact, during the war in Indochina, the French military administration implemented an official editorial policy that covered all modern images, both photography and film.
At the end of the Second World War, France was completely preoccupied with reconstruction and supplies. The Indochina conflict was far away and without any real direct consequences for the majority of the French people, in other words they lacked interest. The Far East Expeditionary Corps had been given the mission to restore French sovereignty which had been severely hit and to « pacify » an essential element of « l’Union Française ». What began as a « simple police operation » to tackle a bandit problem rapidly turned into an international conflict. Politicians and the military were quickly obliged to implement a global strategy and that included controlling « information » to use the term of the time.

Mao Tse Tung’s « Red China » (1949) now had a border with France. General de Lattre de Tassigny was appointed High-Commissioner in 1950 to turn around what had become a difficult situation and the minute he got to Hanoi he set up a communication plan that brought together the civil and military information services. This fusion was to produce the SPI (Service Presse Information). This department was run by Jean-Pierre Dannaud and Captain Michel Frois with the remit to supply the national and foreign press with information and images of the conflict. The SPI was more than a simple organ for the spread of illustrative documentation or propaganda; it was to become a real tactical weapon in the service of the Haut Commissariat. Its main role was to put a positive spin on the activities of the Expeditionary Corps and the civilising actions of French institutions in Indochina faced with communist « disinformation » and the prevailing scepticism at home.
General de Lattre de Tassigny was only too aware of the importance of image so he made information control a primary weapon against the enemy. The main objective was to « sell the war », to heighten public awareness in order to obtain more financing, notably from the U.S.
« Le Roi Jean » (King John) as he was known, was popular and the French army followed his lead. Photographers, film makers, whether they were embedded or accredited were now covering all operations while civilian press correspondents had to make do with briefings from the press camp. « Information » now more open but more controlled and neutralised as a result.

What did all of this produce? A fake output removed from the reality of combat and the complex and contradictory political situation. The SPI directed and depicted (unconsciously?) a war that was not colonial but fratricidal, a war where the French soldier was the only thing left between France and communism. This simple hero was merely continuing on the educational and progressive mission of France in the Far East. Run by a squeaky-clean hierarchy, the French army, with American support and the mosaic of Indochinese peoples couldn’t possibly lose to the Vietminh, a subversive organisation supported by the Chinese and the USSR.

This produced smooth, aesthetic images, where the hardship of combat, distress, suffering and death were missing. The candid shot became the rule. In a conflict that led to the death of thousands of men, the French press never once presented a dead Frenchman. This romantic and unanimous vision was called into question by the American magazine Life (n°5, August 3rd 1953), in an article by one of its best-known reporters David Douglas Duncan. This does not mean that the military photographs taken by Jean Péraud, Raymond Varoqui, Fernand Jentile, Paul Corcuff, Daniel Camus, etc, are of no interest, quite the opposite in fact. However, answering to the military authority to which they were obliged to surrender their negatives, using unsuitable equipment (Rolleiflex 6x6), with no control over the choice and final destination of the images, these photographers were not in a position to highlight original stories. These war photographers, often volunteers with little technical know-how from modest origins, found the conflict full of opportunities that would lead some on to illustrious careers (Pierre Schoendoerffer, Raoul Coutard …)

The exhibition proposes a simultaneous vision of the official photographs (SPI / ECPAD) and less well-known but just as interesting images for the perspective they give of the military. The latter category includes work by Willy Rizzo, Werner Bischof, Raoul Coutard and Pierre Ferrari.
 Paris-Match got tired of the photography being supplied by the army and was looking for something different. The magazine sent its photographer Willy Rizzo to « depict » the war. Werner Bischof purposely turned his back on the conflict and concentrated on the beauty of the people, the women and children. Photographers working within the army provide other visions. Both Pierre Ferrari and Raoul Coutard managed to depict, each in their own way, the realities of combat and of the country in their official capacity. In particular, Pierre Ferrari managed to capture brutal and effective scenes of close combat at the events at Banh Hine Siu, in Laos (January 1954). Raoul Coutard, head of photography for the magazine, Indochine, Sud-Est Asiatique , was one of the few to depict the minorities in colour during his forays on to the high plateaus.

musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
Raoul Coutard,  Minorité Phnong, Cambodge circa 1950 © Raoul Coutard
Raoul Coutard, Minorité Phnong, Cambodge circa 1950 © Raoul Coutard

The same sun

Raoul Coutard, Indochina 1945-1954

16 10 2010 ... 16 01 2011

Raoul Coutard  Fillette Lao, Laos circa 1950 © Raoul Coutard
Raoul Coutard Fillette Lao, Laos circa 1950 © Raoul Coutard
Raoul Coutard Pêcheurs de Nha-Trang, Viet-Nam,  Circa 1950
Raoul Coutard Pêcheurs de Nha-Trang, Viet-Nam, Circa 1950

Before becoming the greatest lighting cameraman of the Nouvelle Vague, Raoul Coutard was a photographer in the French army.
During the war in Indochina, Raoul Coutard learnt how to work under pressure and follow his instinct well beyond his comfort zone. He joined up in 1945 at twenty one with the French Far East Corps expéditionnaire , attracted by the « unexplored white zones » on the map, he was quickly transferred into the geographical department where he remained until 1948. He was moved and overcome by this region of the world and returned between 1950 and 1954. He began as a military photographer-reporter for the cinema department of the French army and went on to become the Head of photography at the magazine Indochine Sud-Est Asiatique .

In Indochina, Raoul Coutard was not yet a cinematographer. He was more interested in getting his work into the National Geographic . In addition to the reportage work he was commissioned to do for the army, he also accompanied ethnologists on their expeditions organised by the École française d’Extrême-Orient. Equipped with a Rolleiflex, two Leicas and a super 8 cine-camera, he shot his work in colour, which was unusual for the time. Along with the ethnologists Charles Archaimbault, Henri Deydier and Jean Boulbet, he depicted the primitive ethnic diversity of Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, all countries that were still relatively unknown in the West. He was fascinated by the beauty of bodies and faces, landscapes and light and brought a sensual eye to the minorities and their traditions.

Between a Conradian exploration and scenes reminiscent of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now , Raoul Coutard’s original images compose an exceptional, rarely shown narrative. His photographic description, transformed by colour and carried by the validity of an ethnological approach – that today is a valuable aid to understanding the era -, nevertheless shows a level of personal expression that was later evident in his work for the cinema.

The musée Nicéphore Niépce enthusiastically embraced the work of this rare, personal, subtle and human photographer. The exhibition places these images back in to their context and reflects on their status some sixty years after they were taken.
Raoul Coutard photographed these « minorities » and passed on to us the last traces of human groups still untouched by the virus of modernity. There is nothing terrible, nothing horrific in the sacrifice of the buffalo, it is but an homage to power and strength. There is nothing offensive about the nubile nudes that project images of a natural state preserved forever. Images before the catastrophe.
Raoul Coutard bears witness to all of this, ethnic groups far from the noise of war, peoples of a natural beauty who reflect our imperfections, our failures and our bad choices as westerners.

Raoul Coutard Minorité Maa, Viet-Nam circa 1950 © Raoul Coutard
Raoul Coutard Minorité Maa, Viet-Nam circa 1950 © Raoul Coutard

In tandem with this exhibition, the musée Nicéphore Niépce and the Éditions Le Bec are publishing :
Raoul Coutard
Le même Soleil, Indochine [1945-1954]
176 pages
Introduction by François Cheval
ISBN : 978-2-916073-60-6
31,90  €

musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
Willy Rizzo Evacuation des civils du camp retranché encerclé par deux divisions vietminh, Nasan 1952 © Willy Rizzo
Willy Rizzo Evacuation des civils du camp retranché encerclé par deux divisions vietminh, Nasan 1952 © Willy Rizzo

Willy Rizzo, 
A photographer against type
16 10 2010 … 16 01 2011

Willy Rizzo Hanoï, couvre-feu, patrouille de nuit 1952 © Willy Rizzo
Willy Rizzo Hanoï, couvre-feu, patrouille de nuit 1952 © Willy Rizzo
Willy Rizzo Camp de prisonniers de combattants vietminh près d’Hanoï 1951 © Willy Rizzo
Willy Rizzo Camp de prisonniers de combattants vietminh près d’Hanoï 1951 © Willy Rizzo

The photographer Willy Rizzo first gained recognition for his « celebrity » photographs. He began his career in Paris working for magazines such as Ciné Mondial  or Point de Vue  and quickly made photographing celebrities his speciality. Working under the protection and on the advice of the photographer Gaston Paris, he cycled between the studios of Billancourt, Joinville and the Buttes-Chaumont, taking shots of all of the stars of French cinema who quickly became fans of his work.

After a report from the Tunisian war and his coverage of the Nuremberg trials, he was sent to Cannes in 1946 by France Dimanche  to cover the first ever film festival. He brought back an impressive brace of princesses, playboys, starlets and stars using his Zeiss Sonnar 180.

In the U.S., where he worked for the Black-Star agency, he lived an urban life, covering Edith Piaf singing at « Versailles » and afterwards with her friends at « El Morocco ». He kept a close eye on the work of Richard Avedon and Erwin Blumenfeld. He then discovered the West coast and photographed actors such as Gregory Peck, Richard Widmark, Gary Cooper, and Anne Baxter...

He moved back to France in 1949 to participate in the launch of Paris-Match . He was one of the few photographers at the time to work in colour and the first ever cover of the weekly was graced with one of his shots.
 For 20 years, Willy Rizzo went on to publish celebrity and fashion reportage until he actually became a legend. Walter Rizzoto, the reporter in « Paris Flash », in the Tintin comic book Les bijoux de la Castafiore , is a blend of Willy Rizzo and his colleague Walter Carone.

Willy Rizzo was not predestined to be a war reporter, but the idea of going against type was what appealed to Paris-Match .
 In 1952, Philippe Boegner, the magazine’s director, tired of the official photographs supplied by the French army of the war in Indochina decided to send a fresh eye into the field.

Willy Rizzo along with the journalist Philippe de Baleine arrived in Indochina, in Hanoi to be precise, travelling from there to Son-La in Tonking, where the French civilians were being evacuated. The duo very quickly irritated or amused, but they were the absolute opposite to the adrenalin junkies already on the ground, Paris-Match  got what it wanted.

The tandem was kept away from combat by the army’s cordoned-off system so Willy Rizzo followed the press camp briefings and gained the trust of the officers. For two months, he depicted the conflict, trying to capture the atmosphere, the preparations, and the sidelines and managed to show the tension of a war that had not yet admitted to being one.

Taking his inspiration from his Hollywood days, Willy Rizzo made each photograph a cinematographic experience. Na San is a panoramic, a battle ground rising out of fog and smoke. The bodies are tense and on edge. Showing the scene before the battle through its atmosphere and ambivalence is worth so much more than showing bad scenes of fighting. Once the fighting starts, you can’t see anything.
 Willy Rizzo thus highlighted Hanoi under curfew. Adding extra lighting made this series published by Paris-Match  in 1952 (n°194 , December 6th 1952) a dark, anxiety-ridden narrative. The anguish of the conflict is counterbalanced by an unpublished and immensely touching series of photos at a Vietminh prisoner of war camp. We see them doing everyday chores ; doing laundry, washing themselves. They are no longer « bandits », nor agents of subversion, they are just like us. This series proves, if need be, that Willy Rizzo’s work goes well beyond celebrity and the jet-set. The composition and lighting are everything, the tension of the subjects palpable. Willy Rizzo knows how to create original and believable situations. For this alone, it is time to reconsider the work of Willy Rizzo.

musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
Mac Adams  Fury 1976 © Mac Adams / Courtesy gb agency / Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce
Mac Adams Fury 1976 © Mac Adams / Courtesy gb agency / Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce

Mac Adams
The narrative void
19 06 … 19 09 2010

Mac Adams  The Pond 2009 © Mac Adams / Courtesy gb agency / Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce
Mac Adams The Pond 2009 © Mac Adams / Courtesy gb agency / Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce

« Mac Adams, The narrative void » is a chance to present a broad retrospective of Mac Adams’ work along with new pieces that have been specially made in collaboration with the museum.

The desire to see and the unease at having seen

Mac Adams is a storyteller/photographer who has lived in the United States since 1967 but who likes to claim his taste for storytelling comes from his Welsh roots and the impact literature and cinema had on him.

His work is part of the conceptual trend that developed in the seventies and in particular the Narrative Art movement. However, unlike a number of artists in this movement that often associated images and text, Mac Adams uses only photography to tell stories inspired by thrillers. The spectator’s comprehension comes from the various clues the artist places in his scenes; in the Mysteries series that dates from 1974 based on crime scenes, the story is never fully told; we see only flashes, images from one or two moments in the narrative which encourage the spectator to mentally reconstitute the action. The spectator thus finds himself free to interpret, bringing his own subconscious personal projections to bear...

« Mac Adams’ work is a skilful diversion from the presuppositions of the modern image. He combines and adjusts narrative elements extracted from the complex history of the mechanical image. To do so, he convokes the artifice of film noir, the gimmick of the lurid news story, the imagery of horror magazines, etc. Mac Adams enjoys manipulating the principles of the real using photography’s ability to renew narrative forms. There is no object left to look at or contemplate, nothing but a simple image with no aesthetic qualities that blends with a statement, often a very banal one, thus providing the backdrop to all possible experience.»
François Cheval (extract from the catalogue Mac Adams, The narrative void, Le bec en l’air)

The narrative void

Mac Adams’ work tests our perception and underlines to what extent our thought processes are conditioned by stereotypes repeatedly trotted out in thrillers, film or television series. Faced with a number of scenarios, it proves the ambiguity of photography relative to reality, its propensity to manipulate. Appearances can be deceptive as is evident in the series Empty Spaces, Islands  and Parallel Lives .

« I build my narratives by limiting the means. How can I tell a story using two or three images, or a situation based on a minimal number of objects? This is where the narrative void comes into play.
The narrative void comes from cinema; it describes the space that exists between the successive moving images. What interested me is what happens in the space between the images, the space between shapes, in general, and the multiple narratives these spaces evoke, in particular in the very specific context of the mystery. Cognition appears in the void. »
Mac Adams
 

Publication in tandem with the exhibition:

Mac Adams, The narrative void
Editions Le bec en l’air
Musée Nicéphore Niépce, MUDAM Luxembourg
Text by Mac Adams, Alexandre Quoi (Contemporary art historian, narrative art specialist) and François Cheval (head curator at the musée Nicéphore Niépce de Chalon-sur-Saône).
ISBN: 978-2-916073-63-7
Cost: 19, 50 Euros

Mac Adams  The third Swan 2009 © Mac Adams / Courtesy gb agency / Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce
Mac Adams The third Swan 2009 © Mac Adams / Courtesy gb agency / Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce
Mac Adams  The party 2009 © Mac Adams / Courtesy gb agency / Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce
Mac Adams The party 2009 © Mac Adams / Courtesy gb agency / Collection du musée Nicéphore Niépce
Mac Adams  The Truce 1999 © Mac Adams / Courtesy gb agency
Mac Adams The Truce 1999 © Mac Adams / Courtesy gb agency
D2010.15.5P01B.jpg Mac Adams  Civil War 1999 © Mac Adams / Courtesy gb agency
D2010.15.5P01B.jpg Mac Adams Civil War 1999 © Mac Adams / Courtesy gb agency
musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
Titre : Exxon Mobil 9 am to 11 am Série : Monuments Année : 2005 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Titre : Exxon Mobil 9 am to 11 am Série : Monuments Année : 2005 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond

Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Possible worlds
19 06 … 19 09 2010

Titre : n°14 Série : TV Année : 2007 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Titre : n°14 Série : TV Année : 2007 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Titre : n°19 Série : TV Année : 2005 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Titre : n°19 Série : TV Année : 2005 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond

The worlds created by Mathieu Bernard-Reymond are grandiose and unsettling. They are the produce of an alliance between traditional silver photography and digital technology; his unusual and magical worlds reveal their mystery only over time.
« Possible worlds » at the musée Nicéphore Niépce will be the artist’s first museum exhibition. It brings together four series  « TV », « Monuments », « Disparitions » and « Vous êtes ici ».

The artist is proficient in traditional photography, the basis of all of his pieces as well as the most cutting edge technology, and he creates his imaginary environments in which man must find his own place.
He invents possible worlds, according to the criteria of a time when the border between real and virtual is for some, more and more blurred. Worlds reflected by trick photography.

The level of manipulation, however low it may be, gives a feeling of emptiness in the Disparitions series, a feeling of time stopping short: deserted countryside and architecture, characters looking toward a horizon that we can not see. Some images have been retouched, the photographer having rubbed out an element present in the original shot, sometimes a simple object. Others are untouched. Real or fiction? Lost in conjecture.

The approach taken in the Vous êtes ici series is different, insisting more on the virtuality of the image. The photograph of an individual, a tourist is used to create a landscape based on the colour of the clothes and the shapes of the model using three dimensional technology. The individual is then placed in the environment they themselves created, a lonely tourist staring at a view he created. Like romantic painting, the landscape reflects the emotions of the observer.

We now live in a screen-based world. This era began with television and continues with the internet. The power of the media image on our everyday life is obvious, many people only see the world through the deformed and partial image transmitted by their television or computer screen, as we can see in the series TV. The television screens symbolically replace windows, screen stars from fiction, entertainment and reality TV, the purveyors of falsehood, are grafted on to real nocturnal landscapes.

The Monuments series from 2005 also mixes the real with the virtual, reflecting our current economic crisis. Gigantic digitally created sculptures, the three-dimensional manifestation of the stock exchange curves of a few big firms are implanted in natural surroundings photographed by the artist. Fictional land art, Mathieu Bernard-Reymond’s interventions stigmatise the power the economy has over the world and the impact of industry on the natural world

Titre : n°89 Série : Disparitions Année : 2005 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Titre : n°89 Série : Disparitions Année : 2005 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Titre : n°05 Série : Disparitions Année : 2000 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Titre : n°05 Série : Disparitions Année : 2000 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Titre : n°19 Série : Vous êtes ici Année : 2002 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Titre : n°19 Série : Vous êtes ici Année : 2002 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Titre : n°15 Série : TV Année : 2005 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Titre : n°15 Série : TV Année : 2005 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Titre : n°30b Série : TV Année : 2007 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Titre : n°30b Série : TV Année : 2007 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Titre : Total Operating Profit Série : Monuments Année : 2005 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Titre : Total Operating Profit Série : Monuments Année : 2005 © Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
Robert Doisneau Planche contact. Richardo. 1950 © Atelier Robert Doisneau
Robert Doisneau Planche contact. Richardo. 1950 © Atelier Robert Doisneau

Robert Doisneau
Mob tattoos
19 06 … 19 09 2010

Robert Doisneau Concours de tatouages dans un bar de la rue Mouffetard. « Au milieu de vrais tatoués, une jeune femme s’est amusée à présenter un faux tatouage » 1950 © Atelier Robert Doisneau
Robert Doisneau Concours de tatouages dans un bar de la rue Mouffetard. « Au milieu de vrais tatoués, une jeune femme s’est amusée à présenter un faux tatouage » 1950 © Atelier Robert Doisneau
Robert Doisneau Youki Desnos montrant la sirène tatouée sur sa cuisse par Foujita vers 1950 © Atelier Robert Doisneau
Robert Doisneau Youki Desnos montrant la sirène tatouée sur sa cuisse par Foujita vers 1950 © Atelier Robert Doisneau

Of all of the subjects covered by Robert Doisneau (1912-1994), one of the most atypical in his light-filled, poetic universe is that of tattoos and the tattooed.
For the first time ever, the musée Nicéphore Niépce is proposing an exhibition entirely dedicated to this subject, with 70 original silver prints, some contact sheets from the collections at the Atelier Doisneau and the Centre national des arts plastiques.  

His friend Robert Giraud, writer and expert in Parisian low-life introduced him to these subjects in 1947. Doisneau was exposed to a world he wasn’t aware of with Giraud. “With Him, I met people on the edge. A group of individuals who lived outside the law. Bob loved to listen to prostitutes and pimps; I found the whole milieu a bit stupid. The whores talked about sex, that wasn’t my thing. But Vogue magazine’s “pseudo distinction” wasn’t my thing either; I had started to find the whole thing frustrating. In the end, I managed to treat my fashion photographer’s depression with my friend Giraud! ». Giraud was fascinated by tattoos and the stories behind them. Along with Doisneau and Jacques Delarue, a police inspector and ex-cellmate during the war, he toured the neighbourhood bistros of les Halles and the rues Mouffetard and Maubert looking for tattooed subjects for his book, Les tatouages du milieu that was published in 1950.

This little anthropological book shows the revolution that took place over half a century for body marking. At the time, tattoos were the almost exclusive preserve of delinquents, criminals and prostitutes, unlike today… It was a veritable language for a marginal population. With no other means of expression, they had their membership of a clan, their exploits, prison terms, love affairs, hatred or hopes tattooed on their skin. Each drawing was an internal code of recognition but also a form of auto-stigmatisation.
In keeping with Lacassagne’s 1881 investigation, Doisneau’s photo reportage illustrating the detailed study by Giraud and Delarue constitutes an eloquent account of the Parisian post-war underground.

« Richardo was the ultimate work of art, covered from head to toe, like walking wallpaper ».
Edmond Faucher (1884-1963), aka Richardo, exhibited his body for a living, Albert Londres nicknamed him the « living Gobelins » when he met him in Biribi prison in 1924. Giraud and Doisneau met him in the bistro des Cloches de Notre-Dame but it was hard to photograph him there. Instead, Doisneau brought him home to take the photographs to his family’s stupefaction.
Richardo ended his life in prison after stabbing someone for being a nuisance. Robert Doisneau claimed that in the « distinguishing marks » column on his passport it said « none »…

« Les Tatouages du milieu » is a chance for the musée Nicéphore Niépce to reaffirm its interest in French photography from the fifties, a genre that has been underestimated and looked down on for many years. It reinforces, if needs be, the central role played by Robert Doisneau in the history of photography, not as a genial storyteller, but as a conscious producer of images and a skilled practician.

This exhibition is possible due to the support of the Centre national des arts plastiques and the Atelier Robert Doisneau in Montrouge.

Robert Doisneau vers 1950 © Atelier Robert Doisneau
Robert Doisneau vers 1950 © Atelier Robert Doisneau
Robert Doisneau Planches contacts vers 1950 © Atelier Robert Doisneau
Robert Doisneau Planches contacts vers 1950 © Atelier Robert Doisneau
Robert Doisneau Jacques Delarue (à g.) et Robert Giraud (à dr.) encadrant Richardo mai 1949 © Atelier Robert Doisneau
Robert Doisneau Jacques Delarue (à g.) et Robert Giraud (à dr.) encadrant Richardo mai 1949 © Atelier Robert Doisneau
musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone
Elaine Constantine Girl with yoyo, décembre 1998 FNAC : INV. 99226 / Œuvre du Centre national des arts plastiques – Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Paris © Elaine Constantine / CNAP
Elaine Constantine Girl with yoyo, décembre 1998 FNAC : INV. 99226 / Œuvre du Centre national des arts plastiques – Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Paris © Elaine Constantine / CNAP

Photograph[e]s, 
From the collection of the Centre national des arts plastiques
27 02 … 30 05 2010

Marylène Negro Eux/Them  N°1 2001 FNAC : INV. 02-491/ Œuvre du Centre national des arts plastiques – Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Paris © Marylène Negro / CNAP
Marylène Negro Eux/Them N°1 2001 FNAC : INV. 02-491/ Œuvre du Centre national des arts plastiques – Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Paris © Marylène Negro / CNAP
Sarah Jones Camilla I 1998 FNAC : INV. 980805 / Œuvre du Centre national des arts plastiques – Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Paris © Sarah Jones / CNAP
Sarah Jones Camilla I 1998 FNAC : INV. 980805 / Œuvre du Centre national des arts plastiques – Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Paris © Sarah Jones / CNAP

This year, in partnership with the Centre national des arts plastiques  (CNAP), a number of the musée Nicéphore Niépce’s temporary exhibitions will present a selection of work from the Fonds national d’art contemporain , France’s largest contemporary art collection that is managed in France and abroad by the CNAP.
 For this, the first partnership, the musée Nicéphore Niépce has selected work by contemporary women photographers Valérie Belin, Elaine Constantine, Sarah Jones, Marylène Negro and Annelies Strba.

« Close, merciless shots depict a severe tableau of inanimate objects and people. In what seems to be a recent but broadly shared approach, women photographers have started, through diverse means, depicting a world where lies take precedence. Feelings and qualms are dispensed with by using an absolutely emotionless descriptive model. Photographic situations are no longer based in the real dispensing with this useless rapport with the demonstrative. This generation of artists has no time for topography and statistical crudity, or for romantic exaltation. What we have been seeing lately is a photography that has thrown off all simplistic psychology. The emotions of young girls have been gotten rid of, love stories forgotten. We are no longer invited, despite ourselves, into unmade beds, and interiors that just need a little tidying. This, sometimes sensationalist, often inappropriate intimacy has been replaced by work whose common denominator seems to be oddity.

Now, affirming oneself as a photographer and a woman means going beyond appearances. Getting back to the essence of things, trapping its reflections, measuring its import, which means a refusal of the anecdotal and the accessory. We have a number of them in our midst. The objects seem like living things and the subjects are reified. This makes us unusually tense. The photographer accepts and plays with this malaise. We are trapped; these simulacra, both objects and characters, contemplate us as if petrified. They are distant and elsewhere, and are disconcerting as they are disenchanted representations of ourselves.

Photographs of surfaces and reflections, their damaging presence reflects the sad original, the postures and fabrications of this tragic farce.
These non-portraits, these objects made of uncertain material look us up and down impassively, like phantoms of reality.

Photography has a debt towards women. In the twenties and thirties they appropriated this new instrument as an act of emancipation. They became part of the wind of change, all the better to carry it.
Immersed in the real world, active in studios and magazines, for about ten years their photos accompanied all fights for freedom.
These explorers of modernity followed the specifics of the machine in all its hidden corners and depicted the female form in all its detail.
What we propose today follows the trail of the photographic “acts” of these free and independent women.”
 

Annelies Strba Sonja mit Samuel-Maria 1994 FNAC : INV. 980691/ Œuvre du Centre national des arts plastiques – Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Paris © Annelies Strba / CNAP
Annelies Strba Sonja mit Samuel-Maria 1994 FNAC : INV. 980691/ Œuvre du Centre national des arts plastiques – Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Paris © Annelies Strba / CNAP
musée Nicéphore Niépce
28, Quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
phone / + 33 (0)3 85 48 41 98
e-mail / contact@museeniepce.com


Classic website / Français
© musée Nicéphore Niépce City of Chalon-sur-Sâone