TOULOUSE.- For the first time, Les Abattoirs, Musée - Frac Occitanie Toulouse and the Galerie Le Château d’Eau are inviting visitors on a journey through their rich yet little-known photographic heritage. The exhibition presents a wide selection of photographic works from the collections of these two public art institutions, documenting major periods in the history of photography and its artists since the early twentieth century, while at the same time revealing the collections’ two, quite separate histories.

Since their creation, the public holdings of these two institutions have grown in keeping with an artistic approach specific to their respective characters. One – an art institution created in 2000 that brings together a museum and a Regional Fund for Contemporary Art (FRAC) – is devoted to modern and contemporary art. The other – founded in 1974 by photographer Jean Dieuzaide – is an iconic centre for modern and contemporary photography in the city of Toulouse.

This exhibition, which is being held at Les Abattoirs, offers visitors the unprecedented opportunity to view a broad range of photographic works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, revealing the connections between not only major artists but also lesser-known artists to be discovered or rediscovered, including Hans Bellmer, Claude Batho, Gaël Bonnefon, Mohamed Bourouissa, Brassaï, Sophie Calle, Denis Darzacq, Jean Dieuzaide, Robert Doisneau, Ralph Gibson, Laura Henno, Ouka Leele, Robert Mapplethorpe, Gina Pane, Agnès Varda, Gisèle Vienne and Sabine Weiss.

These intersecting perspectives also highlight the medium’s diverse techniques and its many aesthetic possibilities, from documentary photography to personal portraits, archives, installations and even photojournalism, all of which provide the conditions for a fresh appreciation of the role of the viewer.

The photographs, along with installations and a selection of artist’s books and rare publications from the extensive libraries of both institutions, form a path that introduces several themes, designed to bring out points of convergence between the two collections while also playing on the singu- larities of each.

From spontaneous snaps to staged images, from graphic or even abstract research to considerations of the body or space and from questions of identity to assertions of subjectivity and the exploration of narrative possibilities, this rich ensemble of almost 300 works represents a critical appraisal of the nature and potential of photography.

Nef – Photographic Bodies

The body is a subject that has been explored by many since the invention of photography. By capturing an entire scene but also by focusing on separate elements, the photographer’s view through the lens brings out the poetry and memory of bodies, combining sensuality and eroticism with combat and trauma.

The works in this section are photographs for which the lens act as a kaleidoscope, fragmenting the body in order to better set it free, elevating it while revealing its particular history or identity. As with Robert Mapplethorpe or Dimitra Dede, the photographer becomes a sculptor working with nudity and expressing the poetry of the body, sometimes to the point of abstraction, as with Kishin Shinoyama. Gina Pane and Pilar Albarracín, however, reveal traces of violence, performed or endured; for these two artists, representing the female body is a way of conveying the alienation and necessary struggle it imposes.

These contrasting approaches also bring out a mosaic of forms that reconfigures shared identities and plays with stereotypes, going so far as to make the portrayed individual anonymous. From Laurent Lafolie’s reinterpretation and reappropriation of facial composite images to Gisèle Vienne’s series of staged puppets evoking the world of teenagers, the body becomes anonymous, the symbol of a social group. Like a puzzle, these bodies reflect a universal history of which they are its many characters. Photography becomes the medium and its intermediary, augmenting the narra- tives and their readings through constantly evolving approaches.

Exhibition Visit

Room 01 – Capturing the Moment

From the very beginning of silver-gelatin photography in the nineteenth century, photographers were obsessed with the idea of interrupting movement, capturing those fleeting instances that even the eye could not perceive.

Scientists and those fascinated with photographic technology, such as British photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) and French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), managed to break down, among other things, the movement of a galloping horse or a bird in flight. From the 1930s onwards and thanks to developments in photographic technology, including more sensitive films and lighter cameras, it became possible to take spontaneous shots, from children playing by Sabine Weiss to pigeons taking flight by Toulousain Jean Dieuzaide. As the illustrated press, which was beginning to flourish, had a growing appetite for this type of image, photojournalism became a major source of photographs.

This was the era of the “decisive moment” so dear to Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004). The myth of the objective or “true” photograph was born out of this practice and under the influence of the press.

Contemporary photographers continue this tradition, sometimes revisiting it through a distortion of reality. Although images are always determined by what has existed in front of the lens, some artists make their own creations, placing themselves into a staged situation that is then captured “on the spur of the moment”. This is the case for performance photography, such as that created by the duo MWANGI HUTTER, or compositions by Denis Darzacq; these artists are heirs to Cartier-Bresson’s quest for the “decisive moment.”

Room 02 – Parallel Realities

Although they challenge the notion of whether “truth” can be attributed to photographs, fabricated images are the invention of the photographer and the visualisation of an image originally held in the mind, just like a painter in a workshop can depict a seascape or an industrial landscape. But the photographer must have at least one foot in reality – there must be something that exists in front of the lens and in space, even though this “reality” may well be fleeting.

Because they could not yet or simply did not wish to reproduce reality, some early photographers began to turn towards staged imagery. Pierre Molinier transformed members of his entourage into transgressive portraits, distorting reality and revealing its essential malleability. Other photographers, familiar with theatrical life along Parisian boulevards, were inspired by the dramatic arts of the 1920s and 30s, and called on famous actors and actresses. For his part, André Kertèsz enjoyed portraying them in unexpected ways.

In the mid-1970s, the staged photographic composition once again became a genre of its own and became increasingly popular. In the surrealist compositions of Ouka Leele and Véronique Ellena, conventional portrayals were subverted, not without humour. The images are the result of a subtle procedure, where the spaces or objects photographed are entirely fabricated before disappearing. A simple, yet unusual angle, a reflection or an incongruous colour in a black-and-white image can be enough to surprise and catch the viewer’s atten- tion.

Combining fact and fiction, these photographs contribute to the re-enchantment of the world and daily life.

Room 03 – Elevating the Commonplace

In 1967, the New Documents exhibition at the MoMA (New York) paid tribute to a new movement in documentary photography, one that had appeared in the nineteenth century. It was not a question of totally letting go of the visual arts as an idea but of distancing oneself from a purely artistic viewpoint. Sometimes political, sometimes neutral, but nonetheless aesthetic, this approach celebrated daily lives and ordinary happenings – the “infraordinary” as French novelist Georges Perec (1936–1982) described it.

The ordinary becomes the main subject of these photographs, which seek inspiration in non-events. There is something of Marcel Duchamp’s (1887–1968) ready-mades: everyday objects suffice in themselves, and insignificant situations are enhanced by the framing, light or colour. After the 1960s and 70s, during which time an abundance of images appeared, the 1990s and the development of digital technologies increased this tendency.

Anything and everything could be a subject: all that was required was familiarising oneself with one’s daily reality. Amateur photography came into its own through the availabi- lity of affordable cameras and mobile telephones; a descriptive yet poetic form of expression was emerging.

The spontaneity and convenience of photography led to a re-conquering of the ordi- nary: Seton Smith and Gaël Bonnefon revived classical still lifes, as did Claude Batho, while Géraldine Lay focused on ordinary scenes – “genre scenes” as it were – observed in the public space and contributing to a new history of art.

Room 04 – Art and Physical Matter

In their constant quest for aesthetic innovation, photographers sometimes effect a return to the more academic forms of art – painting, drawing or sculpture. But no matter whether they reinterpret major themes in art history or focus on substance or composition, their artistic practice maintains its position as a counter-culture.

Photography is blended with installations, handicrafts or even, in the same vein as Surrealism, founded in 1924, with collage, as Dominique Roux does today. She employs raw materials in new visual propositions that feed on their documentary aspect. Photography becomes part of works such as those by Libia Posada or Pierre Leguillon and is no longer only a trace but the living and often critical reflection of our society. Zanele Muholi and her new queer icons and Mohamed Bourouissa refocusing his lens onto the periphery both contribute to a shattering of codes through the use of photography as a political tool for advocacy.

These artists sometimes see themselves more as visual artists than photographers. They compose images that look like paintings, where the light, framing and medium allude to a pictorial aesthetic, an approach adopted by Elina Brotherus and Jean-Marc Bustamante. They also ensure that the reproduceability of the artwork advocated by Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) in 1935 once again becomes possible. These photographers revisit painting’s major genres, from history painting to genre painting and portraits.

Room 05 – Self-production

Portraiture is perhaps the field in which photography has found it most difficult to detach itself from the influence of painting and its aesthetic. In the portrayal of the other and of oneself a quest is expressed, whose codes represent many facets, all subject to infinite metamorphoses.

Initially, in the nineteenth century, this genre was an intensely commercial activity in service to the all-powerful bourgeoisie, including the police and judicial forces who soon latched onto it, but it also became an artistic practice in its own right.

A portrait results from the convergence between an individual who wishes to control, arrange and immortalise their own image and its creator, who is also often eager to assert their own point of view. Some seek relative neutrality while others, who operate somewhere between psychological interpretation and an interest in form, sociology and ethnology, question the meaning and function of their interpretation. Some portraits are born out of the exchange between the photographer and the model, while in others the subject is pushed out of their comfort zone or captured at a precise moment. It is always a matter of challenging or affirming the model’s identity, while revealing their form through the use of light.

In this section, portraits of famous people, including André Malraux (Gisèle Freund), stand alongside those of anonymous individuals (Jean-Louis Garnell). They may represent an era, an event – the bombing of Hiroshima (Hans Silvester) – or a community, for Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, one that is queer. Often, in a rejection of established rules, the photographer instead subverts them, and the portrait then relates to nature and the inanimate world.

Room 06 – The Twofold I

Ever since the famous Self Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840) by the photographic pioneer Hippolyte Bayard (1801–1887), the self-portrait genre has continued the recur throughout the history of photography. Although it has been ascribed to a pictorial tradition, it enables many and varied expressions and is still revisited by artists in search of transformation, or even transvestism.

The staging of oneself often arises out of both aesthetic and political aims, and is at the heart of an exploration of identity. For Pierre Molinier, sexual identity, in particular, is the issue at stake, and the self-portrait genre is the stage for his tranvestism. Seen as provocation, his works require an unexpected process of reflection on identity and social and cultural stereotypes, a theme that is echoed notably in the oeuvre of Ouka Leele and Sory Sanlé.

There is also an element of narcissism evident in the genre, clearly at play in works by Gilbert Garcin. This opens up a discussion on the perception of beauty, an issue that is also at the centre of ORLAN’s experiments. And finally, cultural identity has its role to play too: costumes, traditional jewellery and make-up, or, on the contrary, nudity become accessories to the theatricality of Alexander Apóstol initially, and later of Léa Crespi. These choices transform the photographer into an anthropologist, someone who explores otherness: the “twofold I” is also a portrait of the “other”, its metamorphosis. As a visual artist, the photographer plays with reflections, with the splitting or superposing of two, an act which privileges visual experimentation, opening up photography to ever more domains.

Room 07 – Perspectives – Places

Photography necessarily implies a frame. Although it is often said that it cuts off space, it would be more correct to say that it invents a space and creates an associated out-of-frame space, superposing convergence lines and guiding lines into one cleverly orches- trated choreography.

Photographers with very different graphic and aesthetic styles thus give us the oppor- tunity to contemplate scenes that are the fruit of their own observations. Urban or natural, the landscapes presented here all carry the mark of humankind, beyond simply that of the frame that has been chosen. From war (Mathias Bruggmann) to agriculture, these formal or poetic images are the expression of what the photographer felt while crossing through a space.

Some choose to be descriptive and frontal, integrating graphic elements such as electric wires, which are often seen as unattractive (Gabriele Basilico). Others enjoy the incongruities and strange perspectives to be found in our surrounding environment (Eva Nielsen). These photographers focus on a detail, play with scale or create musical variations on a single decor. And finally, others question the tradition of landscape photography, which they disrupt with incongruous elements, or refer to painting by playing with subtle diffe- rences in colour.

Photography here maintains a constant tension between the pleasure of our gaze and the rigour of exploration. From the spirit of certain places to the sharing of emotion, our perceptions evolve depending on the light – dim, brightly shining or dreamlike, as with Matt Wilson – and no matter the expanse of territory in question.

Room 08 – Perspectives – Lines

Unintentional or created geometries – do these alleviate the disorder in the world or underline it? As always, it all depends on the photographer’s intention. From 1930 onwards, Brassaï began to look carefully at the graffiti that covered the walls of his city: he found innumerable faces – blissful or tormented – and many, many signs – of love, of protest or purely graphic.

These lines drawn by anonymous hands are superposed on the natural surface of the walls. Through them, we can see that photography has more than one way of reminding us that essentially, we are face-to-face with an image, taken knowingly, and that it maintains its subjectivity while playing with snippets of reality. The contrasting of these wide range of forms betrays a desire to compose and produce balanced images, which today is no longer a straitjacket.

Like Jochen Lempert, some photographers enjoy building series or lines, whose rhythm is as important as the composition in their geometrisation of space. Others make use of shadow and contrasts to trace out lines wherever they can be found; bodies become theatre in the work of Ralph Gibson and Liliana Porter or exhausted dancers in that of Émilie Pitoiset.

Lines are also to be found traced by nature in the sky, with clouds or in an exploding geyser unexpectedly captured by SMITH, which humans reconstruct by erecting buildings, or by profoundly transforming landscapes.