Having spent eighteen years at Magnum, seven as the director of its Paris bureau, Diane Dufour, director of Le Bal, is celebrating its seventieth anniversary by presenting and exhibition titled Magnum Analog Recovery.
You said Magnum?
I’ve learnt a lot from my contact with the photographers throughout the years when I worked at the agency. Le Bal is another adventure that has been determined by my experience in the agency. On the occasion of its 70th anniversary, the photographers and I wanted to show Magnum in a different way.
How?
Magnum was much published, much exposed. We wanted to add something else. At this time of our reflections, a fund called Magnum Analog Recovery was created, the title of the exhibition presented at the Bal: Analog, as opposed to digital because it consists of vintage press prints and Recovery because they were recovered.
So tell us about the exhibition’s structure?
The first room is devoted to the 1950s, Europe after the war, the creation of Israel, the Algerian war, the Ku Kux Klan, the formation of the two blocs …. In the lower level of Le Bal, the thread continues with topics such as segregation in the United States, J.F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War … until the 1970s and the Iranian revolution. The astonishing scenography of Cyril Delhomme was inspired by the boxes preserved at Magnum and classified by photographer. Inside these boxes, the prints are in bulk. Sometimes, for a story, the best image is missing… So it’s a random fund. We did not try to reconstruct the stories or compensate for the missing images. Without trying to work as a historian, we made a very personal choice among these 80,000 draws. They were privileged images little known, never published or exposed, which finally draw a Magnum more complex, more ambiguous.
Interview by Sophie Bernard
Magnum Analog Recovery
From 29th April to 27th August 2017
Le Bal
6, Impasse de la Défense
75018 Paris
France
