The Galerie Jean-François Cazeau is hosting an exhibition by photographer Pierre Jahan (1909-2003), entitled Photograms and Rayograms: 1940-1950.
Born in 1909, Pierre Jahan belonged to a generation of photography pioneers who considered photography not a scientific or technical practice, but an art of pleasure and freedom. A multifaceted, unclassifiable avant-garde figure, he viewed the medium as a training ground, whose sole law resided in the pleasure of the eye and the hand. Thus, in this quest for recognition of photography as an art in its own right, endowed with its own artistic and expressive possibilities, Pierre Jahan joins his peers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Lee Miller, László Moholy-Nagy and Dora Maar, as well as their colleagues on the other side of the Atlantic, such as Alfred Stieglitz.
Pierre Jahan experimented with new techniques, photogram, rayogram, superimposition, photomontage and photocollage until the very end. He was one of those artists, along with Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray and Christian Schad, who practiced photography without a camera: the photogram, for example or rayogram in Man Ray’s term was a photograph obtained by simply interposing an object between the photosensitive paper and the light source. His process fixed the image, allowing silhouettes to be obtained in negative on the final photograph.
L’Herbier surréaliste (1945-1948), featured in the exhibition, is arguably Pierre Jahan’s most surprising series of photograms. The artist returned to the scientific origins of the process often used in botany, while simultaneously subverting it. Thus, examples of grasses and other plants are superimposed on photographs. The fire in his apartment and studio in 1948 unexpectedly helped finalize the works. The photographs in this series were partially burned, creating a new visual dimension of the image. While the fire was an accident, it does not negate its contribution to Jahan’s work. Chance still plays a fundamental role in surrealism, after all. It is one of its fundamental elements. With the fire, the Herbarium became even more surreal.
Pierre Jahan : Photogrammes et Rayogrammes : 1940-1950
Until December 20, 2025
Galerie Jean-François Cazeau
8 rue Sainte-Anastase
75003 Paris
01 48 04 06 92
www.galeriejfcazeau.com
Tuesday to Saturday, 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.
