By combining its own photographic collections with the famous collection of Marin Karmitz, the Centre Pompidou offers us with its exhibition "Body to Body" "a new look at photographic representations of the human figure in the 20th and 21st centuries".

A sprawling exhibition featuring over 500 photographs and documents, divided into seven sections: Early Faces, Automatism? Flashes of Insight, Fragments, Within, Interiors, and Specters. 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-garde." As the psychoanalytic exploration of the self developed, the face—"that which forbids us to kill," as the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas put it—became, through the dramatic interplay of light and shadow, the object of an intimate and aesthetic quest.

In the section "Automatism?", the discussion turns to the appropriation of photo booths (which appeared in the 1920s), first by Surrealist artists, then by numerous activist and protest artists, who, in the 1960s, denounced identity stereotypes. This remains a relevant reference point, as many contemporary artists still play, often with humor, with its aesthetic codes: frontality, seriality, and anonymity resulting from the decontextualization of the image against a neutral background.

THE REINVENTION OF FACES

In "Fulgurances," we then see these magical moments captured on the fly—gestures, glances, postures, funny, serious, or tender, stolen from time, revealing much about inner life as well as human relationships… "Photography […] is the hunting instinct without the desire to kill. It's the hunt for angels… We stalk, we aim, we shoot, and—snap!—instead of a dead body, we create an eternal one," declared one of these visionary photographers, Chris Marker, in 1966. Dorothea Lange (with her 1934 "Darned Stockings"), Jakob Tuggener (with his truncated bodies of sailors in 1947), and W. Eugene Smith in the late 1960s, for their part, present fragmented bodies, broken up by framing, during the shooting or printing process. While the sensuality of bodies is often amplified in these "fetish images," they also possess a certain dramatic force capable of telling, beyond the eroticized body, of desire, labor, or pain…

FRAGMENTED BODIES

With Blind Ingrid (White Eyes) [Ingrid aveugle (Yeux blancs)] by Douglas Gordon from 2002, we are faced with a true allegory of interiority.
introducing the section entitled “In Itself.” Thus, Ingrid Bergman’s statuesque face in a powerful chiaroscuro appears unattainable, like so many other faces absorbed in their thoughts, to which both the photographer and the viewer remain strangers. Similarly, to a certain extent, this is true of the bodies photographed in enclosed spaces, to which the “Interiors” section is devoted. And also of the ghostly bodies in the final section entitled “Specters.” These are taken from recordings of reflections (Lisette Model, First Reflection, New York, 1940).
Through the use of blurring, photomontages (Val Telberg, Rebellion Call, 1953) or other solarization effects, these "ghosts" make the boundaries of reality traditionally associated with the photographic field waver and open up many perspectives…

"BODY TO BODY. HISTORY(IES) OF PHOTOGRAPHY"
POMPIDOU CENTER
PLACE GEORGES-POMPIDOU, PARIS 4TH ARRONDISSEMENT
UNTIL MARCH 25, 2024
CENTREPOMPIDOU.FR