1. Alvin Langdon Coburn, Vortograph 2, 1917,
© The Universal Order, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Blur - an abstract story
Until the end of May, Photo Elysée in Lausanne present an exhibition dedicated to Blur, quite an unknown and complicated term to define. If you look online or in a dictionary you find the definition of Blur: "Something vaguely or indistinctly perceived" or "Something moving or occurring too quickly to be clearly seen".
The curator of the exhibition which has done her PHD on the subject tries to tell the story of "Blur", from paintings and also photographs (of course). At the time of the invention of photography, the medium was not well received, first because most of the person of the time we're still painters, depicting landscapes, portraits and seascapes in a realistic matter, but with their own style, sometime using quite extravagant colours, shapes, and brushstrokes.But when the photographic medium was invented at the start of the 19th century, people were photographed and printed exactly like they are, in a realistic matter. Of course you can change and trick the photograph by changing the lens, the aperture, the light, the shutter speed, etc. But you need to keep in mind that photography was a scientific experiment, first Thomas Wedgwood tries to made the first attempt to capture the camera images in permanent form at around 1800, but while he made photograms, he didn't found a way to fix these images.
Decades later, Nicéphore Niépce find a way to fix the image which was produced and captured by the sensor of the camera, but the process took hours or days of exposure. The associate of Niépce, Louis Daguerre will later invent his own process by using glass plates and by reducing the time of exposure to only a minute. The details coming from this process were stunning, and it produced a clear and well-exposed photograph.
After printing made on glass with the process of Louis Daguerre, other paper based processed were produced such as Calotype negative and salt print technique invented by Talbot in 1839.
Beside the evolution of the printing process, the camera change a lot, and now they are able to capture the world in seconds, or even fractions of seconds. But there we're a problem, maybe the change from painting to reality was too fast, and people we're shock to see such beautifully defined faces and pictures.
Thus, the start of the exhibition questions the notion of aesthetic in the early 19th century. On one side you still have paintings created by Henner or Corot which are blurred images of a landscape or a portrait, and on the other side you have the photographic mediums which tries to redefine what we want to see.
Abstracts shapes and movements
2. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, La Loïe Fuller aux Folies-Bergères, 1893,
© Tous droits réservés : Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi, Tarn, France
The second half of the exhibition is dedicated to the theme of movement and the use of photography in the early 1900-1930. To introduce the section, the curator of the exhibition Pauline Martin decided to place Loïe Muller, a performer of burlesque theatre at the heart of the theme. Thus, you are able to see how Loïe Muller or Marie Louise Fuller became one of the icons of photographs, painters and artists at the turn of the 20th century.
While the dancer was born in Fullersburg, Illinois (in the suburb of Chicago), Fuller started her career as a professional actress and later choreographed and dancer in the Burlesque, Vaudeville and circus show. During her practice, Fuller was known for creating performance which was not planned, but rather free, depending on the music, her moods, the emotions she wants to convey and the look of the dress she wore or the set she plays in.
In the 1890s, she decided to focus her dance around movement, to do so she created a long dressed made out of fabric, entirely white but entirely illuminated by multi-coloured lighting of her own design, which will lead to the creation of the Serpentine Dance. To broaden her public and to seek recognition for her work, the artist decided to move all around Europe, such as Paris where she became one of the leading revolutionaries in the arts.
Fuller's pioneering work attracted the attention, respect, and friendship of many French artists and scientists, including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Auguste Rodin, Maurice Denis, Marie Curie and many others.
Beside the importance of movement, the exhibition also traces the importance of experimentation and avant-garde artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and many other. Most of them came to be a photographer after the First World War and the Russian revolution of October 1917, one of them being El Lissitzky, who stated "The (painted) picture fell apart together with the old world that it had created for itself. The new world will not need pictures. If it needs a mirror, it has the photograph and the cinema" (El Lissitzky, “The Conquest of Art"), First inspired by Suprematism, and later by Constructivism, the avant-garde photographer coming from Russia we're known for there composed and detailed composition, featuring geometrical figures such as circles, squares, triangles, etc.
One of the most important differences between the "classic" photograph and the one of the avant-garde being that most of avant-garde figures who now embraced photography did not approach the medium as professionally trained photographers, but as artists who wanted to probe its potential in the same way that they had previously investigated painting and sculpture. Some of those persons experimented before with abstraction and figuration suing classical material such as paint and canvas, watercolours, engravings. Now they wanted to explore the means of manipulating material as well as the nature of the material itself, putting them and using them as filters. They used apertures, contrasts and development of the picture in the dark room as part of the process of experimentation, thus creating a new atmosphere between the subject and the photographer intention.
The last section of the exhibition is dedicated to contemporary photographers, from the 1970 to today, from Gerhard Richter to Philippe Cognée, and contemporary photographer such as Thomas Ruff.
The exhibition catalog
The exhibition catalog which was published by Delphire & Co and Photo Elysée includes texts from Pauline Martin, Martin Barnes, Martine Beugnet, Florian Ebner, Michel Poivert, Sébastien Lifshitz and Serge Tisseron.
ISBN: 979-10-95821-58-8
Price: CHF 55
Informations about the exhibition
Place: Photo Elysée
Date: 3.3.2023 – 21.5.2023
Curators: Pauline Martin
Ticket: Available at the front desk of the museum
Informations about Photo Elysée
Photo Elysée
Place de la Gare 17
CH-1003 Lausanne
Suisse
Phone: +41 21 318 44 00