PHOTO:The Memory of the Future
The exhibition “The Memory of the Future”, at the Musée de l’Elysée, opens up a dialogue between the work of the pioneers of photographic techniques (the past), those of contemporary artists that breathe new life into these skills (the present), and avant-garde technologies that update these early processes (the future).
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Musée de l’Elysée Archive
In the exhibition “The Memory of the Future. Photographic Dialogues between Past, Present and Future”, works from Musée de l’Elysée collections, contemporary artists and new technologies come face to face and join forces to give a brand new vision of the history of photography, aiming to configure the present by reconfiguring the past in order to prefigure the future. Early photographic processes such as ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, ferrotypes, cyanotypes, etc. are displayed next to works by contemporary artists who breathe life into them. The technical innovations of the past are fertile ground for contemporary art and design. The exhibition includes a waxed paper negative by Gustave Le Gray in dialogue with those by Martin Becka, while cyanotypes by Anna Atkins and Paul Vionnet converse with those by Christian Marclay, Nancy Wilson-Pajic and John Dugdale. Jean-Gabriel Eynard’s daguerreotypes from the museum’s collections are exhibited next to portraits by Takashi Arai and Patrick Bailly-Maître-Grand and landscapes by Binh Danh and Jerry Spagnoli. And as for contemporary ferrotypes, the exhibition presents the work of Joni Sternbach and Jayne Hinds Bidaut as well as portraits taken by Victoria Will at the Sundance Independent Film Festival in 2014. Works of two scientists who won a Nobel Prize and invented a photographic technique also have pride of place, a self-portrait by Gabriel Lippmann (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1908) who invented color photography using the interferential method and a portrait of Dennis Gabor (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971), the inventor of the holographic process, a photographic technique in relief, echoing a holographic picture by James Turrell, a contemporary artist primarily concerned with light. Lastly, and as a point of convergence for all these photographic processes to fix an image on to a support, the camera obscura is presented through the works of Florio Puenter, Dino Simonett and Vera Lutter. Loris Gréaud invited to present an original installation capturing the spirit of the Musée de l’Elysée by recording its shadows and light- also explores this technique. The first photographic self-portrait in history, by Robert Cornelius in 1839, is reproduced on a series of mirrors by Oscar Muñoz to examine the paradox of the aging of the photographic support, which is, however, supposed to record an image for eternity. While Pierre Cordier pays homage to Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic breaking down of movement, Idris Khan (who took part in the reGeneration exhibition in 2005) pays homage to the iconic photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher.
Info: Curator:Tatyana Franck, Assistant Curators:Lydia Dorner & Emilie Delcambre, Musée de l’Elysée, Avenue de l’Elysée 18, Lausanne, Duration: 25/5-28/8/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.elysee.ch
