Nicolas Grospierre, installation #536 from The Picture Which Grows, 2011, coutesy of Jovis
The town of Lectoure, France, surveys masters of experimental photography and film past and present - reaching from Jerzy Lewczyński and his contemporaries up to Agnieszka Polska and Nicolas Grospierre today
The annual l'Eté Photographique takes over five locations across the mountain town north of Toulouse, filling its public spaces with an insightful exploration of the world's talented personalities in the field of photography and video art. Held under the theme of "the experience of photography", the 2013 edition singles out a concise group of a dozen names that are recognised around the world for the highly characteristic way they refer to realities - and abstractions - from the latter half of the 20th century through today. The main exhibition series includes eight representatives of Poland's most experimental group - from its pioneers to the present day, divided into five distinct exhibitions.
Deux générations d’avant-garde de la photographie polonaise / Two Generations of Polish Avant-garde Photography takes as its starting point Jerzy Lewczyński (born 1924) and his contemporaries, with a showcase titled Jerzy Lewczyński - Les amis de Lewczyński: Beksiński, Schlabs, Piasecki. These experimentalists of the 1950s pushed the envelope to a remarkable extent, in spite of any financial hardships or political barriers they may have encountered in socialist Poland. Nonetheless, the "thaw" of the era did give way to greater artistic freedom, spurring on a flurry of very creative work in the visual arts - in particular, experimental photography and video. Artists of the day pursued new forms of photographic expression, incorporating such elements as montage, found photographs, negative images to liberate their work from the stringency of accepted forms of academic and reportage photography.
Lewczyński was said to call his experiments "anti-photographs", which reflected the spirit of the post-modern, neo-surrealist vein running through French letters. The exhibition in Lectoure is the first monographic survey of the sort outside of Poland, presenting over 100 photographs spanning the 1950s through 2010. It traces the stages of Lewczyński craft and inspirations, from the subjectivity of spectatorship to its realistic aspects in its sober approach to documentation.
The open-ended approach to photography has been revived in the current generation, with the likes of Agnieszka Polska (born 1985) and Nicolas Grospierre (born 1975) pushing the boundaries of the art form in the present. Two exhibitions make direct links between two more masters of the past with their relative counterpart in the present, namely Tadeusz Rolke and Józef Robakowski with Polska and Grospierre. Rolke is also included in a survey of humanist photography across four generations, featuring Rolke (1929), Bruce Wrighton (1950-1988), Guillaume Herbaut (1970) and Emanuela Meloni (1987).
This survey examines the emphathetic approach to photography - lucid, unwilling to aestheticise their subjects. Instead they approached reality as closely as they could, without worrying about the impact on the spectator. The goal was to uncover reality as authentically as the medium would allow. It features Tadeusz Rolke's work documenting an experimental 2-week "Action Reconciliation" exercise situating a group of young people from West Germany on the territory of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp as way of stimulating memory and conscience 20 years after the war ended. It also presents a series of photographs of abandoned shtetls across Poland and the current-day territories of Lithuania and Ukraine to explore anew remnants of Hassidic mysticism that was grounded in these lands over centuries then almost altogether swept away over the course of a few seasons.
Agnieszka Polska, still from the "How the Work is Done", 2011, (video)Courtesy of the artists and ŻAK | BRANICKA Gallery, Berlin
Agnieszka Polska and Nicolas Grospierre are contemporary artists who are very much engaged in the power of nostalgia - even nostalgia for things that are not particularly pleasant in the typical sense - within works of artistic photography and, in Polska's work, film. Polska's visually powerful explorations of lost times or half-forgotten figures of the Polish avant-garde look at how the past is fictionalised and re-worked. The animated videos presented in Lectoure are prime examples of her pursuit of the "invisible part" of our world using found footage and montage. Her works evoke a sense of melancholia, and a longing for something that perhaps never was through a series of subtle interventions that play with our perception of reality.
Nicolas Grospierre, a French-Polish photographer and experimental artist born in Geneva and today based in Warsaw, also uses the past as his subject through documentary projects that intertwine the real and the illusory in a single guise. His works often take up the issue of collective memory and utopian aspirations - both expired and existing. Photo-montage or even its practical semblance, achieved by layering images as the photograph is being taken (not after), is also a standard technique of his practice, achieving, albeit, some quite astounding results. In The Picture That Grows (2011), a series of more than 500 images that take on the form of a photographic installation on order and disorder, harmony and entropy in Tadeusz Sumiński's former studio and archive, is both the subject and medium for an abstract, eye-catching tribute to the infinite possibilities of the photographic image. On show in Lectoure are 25 images representative of the evolution of the series, rounding out with image #536.
Józef Robakowski, "W. Wiszniewski", from the "Fetishes" series, 1987. Photo courtesy of the artist
No longer having to justify the very practice of experimentation (a given in today's artistic climate), today's artistic photographers are driven by the increasingly powerful role of media in today's culture, the incessant, voluminous flow of imagery and information that everyday life engenders. This is an idea that was presented by Józef Robakowski in 1995 and continues to prevail as the dominant idea in the realm of photography, video and new media two decades on. Robakowski (born 1939 in Poznań) is the most significant figure when it comes to launching a dialogue between film and contemporary art, founding a profound movement for experimentalism in the 1970s through the Film Form Workshop and other initiatives. The event in Lectoure also features screenings of several films by Robakowski which influenced both the art world and the realm of cinema.
Likewise, the vein of experimentation, heralded in great measure by the Polish avant-garde, is opened up to the international forum, with representatives as Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil, Annette Merkenthaler, Pierre-Lin Renié and Bruce Wrighton crafting their own experimental style throughout the late 20th century.
Zdzisław Beksiński, "Untitled", 1956. Courtesy of Bosz Publishing
With access to the private collection of Cezary Pieczyński, this year's l'Eté Photographique gains access to a rich store of images created by Jerzy Lewczyński, Zdzisław Beksiński, Bronisław Schlabs and Marek Piasecki. The four friends collaborated on a number of exhibitions, the most important of which was the "closed presentation" in Gliwice in 1959 - a milestone in the history of Polish photography.
From the sensual effects produced by the images of Beksiński and Lewczyński the work ranges to the abstract, post-surrealist works of Marek Piasecki. This group, recognising a "crisis" in photography that called for a break with traditional techniques and with the style of socialist realism that was touted by the authorities in favour of a more abstract form that strays from the standard references to reality. These new approaches included innovative techniques of photomontage and alternative styles of capturing and developing an image. The collection amassed by Pieczyński presents a very rich store of some of the most significant works of Polish and foreign artists across the 20th and 21st centuries.
The town of Lectoure has been designated as a "town of art and history" by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication since 1985. Each year it hosts the l'Eté Photographique / Summer of Photography over four weeks between July and August. This year's edition starts on the 20th of July and runs through the 25th of August, with ten major exhibitions exhibitions, plus lectures, workshops and other events taking place in five historic art spaces throughout the town.
For general information, see: www.centre-photo-lectoure.fr. For a full programme (in French) of the event, see: www.centre-photo-lectoure.fr/images_ete13/capl_ete13_guide.pdf
The exhibitions of works by Polish artists were made possible with the support of the Polish Institute in Paris and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
Author: Agnes Monod-Gayraud
Source: press materials, curatorial statement, own sources
Thumbnail credit: Agnieszka Polska, still from the "How the Work is Done", 2011 (video). Courtesy of the artist/ŻAK | BRANICKA Gallery, Berlin
23.07.2013