The Centre Pompidou's "Corps à corps" exhibition, which combines its famous photographic collection with that of collector Marin Karmitz, offers us "an unprecedented look at photographic representations of the human figure in the 20th and 21st centuries".

A comprehensive exhibition featuring over 500 photographs and documents, divided into seven sections: First Faces, Automatism? Fulgurances, Fragments, En soi, Intérieurs and Spectres. The first section is justified by the fact that "at the beginning of the 20th century, the face in close-up became a recurring motif in the photographic work of the avant-gardes". As the psychoanalytic exploration of the self developed, the face - "that which forbids us to kill", as the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas put it - became the object of intimate and aesthetic research, with its play of light and shadow.

In the "Automatisme?" section, the focus is on the hijacking of photomatons (which appeared in the 1920s), first by Surrealist artists, then by numerous activist and protest artists in the 1960s, denouncing identity stereotypes. A reference still relevant today, since many contemporary artists still play, not without humor, with its aesthetic codes: frontality, seriality and anonymity, all derived from the decontextualization of the image taken against a neutral background.

REINVENTING FACES

Then in "Fulgurances" we see these moments of magic caught on the fly - gestures, glances, funny, serious or tender postures stolen from time, speaking volumes about interiority and human relationships... "Photography [...] is the hunting instinct without the desire to kill. Photography [...] is the instinct to hunt without the desire to kill. It's the hunting of angels... You stalk, you aim, you shoot and - clack! instead of a dead body, you make an eternal one", said one of these visionary photographers, Chris Marker, in 1966. Dorothea Lange (with her darned stockings of 1934), Jakob Tuggener (with his truncated bodies of sailors in 1947) or W. Eugene Smith at the end of the 1960s, for their part, show fragmented bodies, broken up by framing, whether during the shooting or the printing process. While the sensuality of the body is often heightened tenfold in these "fetish images", they also conceal a definite dramaturgical force that, beyond the eroticized body, tells of desire, toil or pain...

FRAGMENTED BODIES

Douglas Gordon's Blind Ingrid (White Eyes) (2002) is a veritable allegory of interiority
introducing the section entitled "En soi" ("In oneself"). Ingrid Bergman's face, statuesque in powerful chiaroscuro, appears unreachable, as do many other faces absorbed in their own thoughts, to which the photographer and viewer remain strangers. The same is true, to a certain extent, of the bodies photographed in enclosed spaces, to which the "Interiors" section is devoted. The same is true of the ghostly bodies in the final section, "Spectres". Stemming from recordings of reflections (Lisette Model, First Reflection, New York, 1940),
from the use of blurs, photomontages (Val Telberg, Rebellion Call, 1953) or other solarization effects, these "ghosts" blur the boundaries of reality traditionally associated with the photographic field, and open up many new perspectives...

" BODY TO BODY. HISTOIRE(S) DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE"
CENTER POMPIDOU
PLACE GEORGES-POMPIDOU, PARIS 4E
UNTIL MARCH 25, 2024
CENTREPOMPIDOU.FR