Auguste Rodin, a contemporary of the invention of photography, was one of the first to use the medium in his work, both as a documentary tool and as a communication device in the circulation and the archiving of his work. He used to call professional photographers regularly to illustrate critics’ and journalists’ articles. Moreover, his sculptures inspired many photographers from pictorialists to contemporary artists.
The book by Emmanuel Berry takes its place in the long photographic history around Rodin’s sculptures by bringing a new view of the originality of his approach. Following strict rules: the sculpture is isolated on a black background, lit by natural light, he is interested, at the same time, in both the studies and the more personal unfinished examples of his work mostly from the collections and in the iconic sculptures such as The Kiss, Balzac or The Thinker, kept at the Rodin Museum in Paris.
The photographer reveals the sculptor’s graphic research through these models and casts. He also highlights the creative gesture, that of the hand that shaped the figures and the sensitive part of the work. As underlined by Marie Guillot in her text, Emmanuel Berry’s photographs bring the eroticism to the fore “in the silky blackness of Eve’s pubis, and the dense shadow of her back where the small points of hazy light invites the gaze to lose itself” or the passage of time when “the flesh is felt, the breasts are sagging, the shoulders weary, the foreheads knotted”. They are evidence of the modernity of all of Rodin’s sculptures, “misunderstood by some of his contemporaries, that had to be shown the beauty of the incomplete and the inchoate”.
Two essays accompany this immersion into the sculptor’s creative world. In the first historic text, Hélène Pinet, responsible for the Musée Rodin’s photographic collection, tells how the history of photography accompanied Rodin’s work. The philosopher Marie Guillot analyses the approaches of Emmanuel Berry through the prism of the links between sculpture and photography.
Emmanuel Berry, Rodin
Published by Xavier Barral
€35
www.exb.fr
