From April 22 to July 23, 2023, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and the Power Station of Art, Shanghai present La vie moderne, the first solo exhibition in China by Raymond Depardon, a French photographer and filmmaker who, since the 1970s, has profoundly renewed the world of the contemporary image.
Bringing together a hundred photographs and three films, the exhibition shares, for the first time with the Chinese public, the approach of an artist who puts the image at the service of simple writing, often frontal, stepping aside to leave room for the subject, not looking for the decisive moment, and preferring the everyday to the sensational. Always looking for the right distance, Raymond Depardon builds a relationship with beings or places, listens and gives voice, and casts a humanist gaze on the world.
Borrowing its title from the film which, in 2008, closed the trilogy Profils Paysans, produced with Claudine Nougaret, the exhibition La vie moderne recounts Raymond Depardon’s attachment to the rural world and offers a look at France today, that of the countryside, the outskirts, intermediate and uneventful territories, far removed from clichés, the picturesque or romantic vision. Son of farmers, he narrates the world by telling about himself and, alternating black and white and color, he reinvents landscape photography.
Playing with the face to face between photography and film, the scenography designed by Adrien Gardère underlines the extent to which the practices of filmmaker and photographer are linked, dialogue and echo each other in the trajectory of Raymond Depardon, who has often questioned the way of exposing the moving image.
After having presented in 2022, at Triennale Milano, the largest exhibition ever of the work of Raymond Depardon, the Fondation Cartier extends with La vie moderne the dialogue initiated with the artist in the 1990s and offers the Chinese public a new reading of his work, a preview of which was offered at the Power Station of Art in 2018, during the exhibition A Beautiful Elsewhere which brought together works from the collection of the Cartier Foundation.
Raymond Depardon, La vie moderne
April 22 – July 23, 202
Power Station of Art
200 Hua Yuan Gang Lu, 周家渡 Huangpu Qu, Shanghai, Chine, 200231
