Château de Compiègne is a sleeping beauty which is slowly being awakened by the senior curator Rodolphe Rapetti and at the moment, a modest exhibition of costumes worn by Empress Eugénie, Napoléon III’s wife, is matched by a brilliant book written by Laure Chabanne with photographs by Gustave Le Gray, paintings and watercolors by Eugène Lami, and numerous artifacts which give … Read More
Josef Koudelka is magic at BNF
It’s rare to enter an exhibition of photographs and to be mesmerized. Of course, you rarely have the conjunction of an amazing space, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France with its huge heights, a brilliant photographer Josef Koudelka, and a team of scenographers (Jasmin Oezcebi), researchers, curators as high in quality. This show “RUINS” of 110 panoramic prints (124 cm X … Read More
At MahJ, berber jewelry is worn by Moroccan Jews
It all started with Hannah Assouline‘s passion for history and when she found a picture of her father’s as a young groom, shot by Jean Besancenot in 1935 in Southern Morocco, this woman who is herself a photographer, decided to research more about the Jewish community in Morocco. Photographer Jean Besancenot (1902-1992) spent his life documenting costumes and jewelry in … Read More
Frank Horvat makes a glamorous comeback at Galerie Lelong
I met Frank Horvat at Vogue Hommes in the 1980’s when he started diversifying from fashion photography and photojournalism to many other topics and I saw him again when he shooting the collection of costumes of Palais Galliera in the 1990’s. He is the most generous and charming photographer you can meet. The 1980’s are exactly the period when he … Read More
Charles Xelot photographs “gas under the tundra”
It took three polar winters to shoot this series of photographs in the Peninsula of Yamal in the Russian Arctic, where natural gas is being produced and French photographer Charles Xelot is the living witness of the transformation of wild tundra inhabited by the Nenets into fields of pipelines. The sea coast is now illuminated by the lights of oil … Read More
Nathalie Boutté “Way down south” at Magnin-A galerie
I first encountered Nathalie Boutté‘s minutious art at Art Paris and have since been following the evolution of her little papers with great interest. The title for her solo exhibition at Galerie Magnin-A comes from a poem by Virginian writer Daniel Webster Davis published in 1897, “Weh Down Souf”. It is entirely inspired by the photography collection of Rufus H.Holsinger, … Read More
Claudia Andujar’s fight for the Yanomami tribe at Fondation Cartier
The exhibition at Fondation Cartier is, once again, more political than artistic. But some of you might be interested to discover the fight led by the Yanomami people in North Western Brazil and Venezuela. And thanks to Claudia Andujar, the Brazilian photographer born (Claudine Haas) in Switzerland in 1931, who fled Europe and her father’s extermination in Dachau, we can … Read More
Charlotte Perriand is also a photographer
In the large Charlotte Perriand exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton, I spotted a few powerful photographs and my curiosity was aroused. So as soon as I heard of the new show at Institut de France, I rushed and was happy to visit the very elegant place with the curator Lélia Wanick Salgado and the architect’s daughter, Pernette Perriand-Barsac who worked with … Read More