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A brief and incomplete history of the column by Elizabeth Lennard

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Currently exhibiting at the Gilles Peyroulet & Cie. Gallery in Paris, Elizabeth Lennard presents her photographs dating from 1971 to 2009 on the theme of the column, which has become an evidence in her work. The series is composed of twenty hand-painted vintage prints.

The slender architecture of the Temple of Concord,  has withstood many centuries, it brings it close to our standard of beauty and harmony.It is to the temples of Paestum,  like the figure of gods as opposed to the image of giants,” wrote Goethe in 1787.[1] The first columns I photographed were at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in 1971. Then, when I came across the vestiges of the Temple of Delos in Greece, I became captivated by ancient ruins.

I realized later that I was following in the footsteps of past travelers, such as Goethe, Tocqueville, and Berenson, and that, in my own way, that is in reverse, I was doing the Grand Tour, as the English used to call this voyage of initiation, which marked the birth of romanticism. This voyage began in America, with the remnants of a building in Harlem, a bank in Brooklyn, a cinema in Manhattan; from there, it took me to Europe, to an insane asylum in Paris, and to Asia, to a sex shop in Tokyo. For columns are everywhere.

Upright and firmly rooted in the ground, fallen, or fallen and erected anew. Perhaps I’m also attracted to their geometry and to the way they divide space, becoming entrenched in the modern landscape, opening up a field where I can apply color. Paestum, Merida, Tharros, Rome, Berlin, Paris, Reims, Grenada, Segeste, Agrigento, Catania, Selinunte, Belur, Aphrodisias, New York, Tokyo.

Elizabeth Lennard  

Elizabeth Lennard is a photographer and filmmaker born in 1953 in New York. She lives and works in Paris.

 

Elizabeth Lennard: Une histoire brève et incomplète de la colonne—Photographies 1971–2009
March 8 to April 28, 2018
Gilles Peyroulet & Cie
80 rue Quincampoix
75003 Paris
France

www.galeriepeyroulet.com

 

 

[1] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Sicily, March–May 1787,” in Italian Journey, trans. Elizabeth Mayer (Penguin, 1970), p. 267. — Translator’s note.

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