Ladies and Gentlemen! – The Camera as a Mirror at Moderna Museet in Malmö, Sweden focuses on the art of portrait photography and how artists like Warhol, Mapplethorpe or Fosso creates images that depict people not just as they actually are, but also as they would like to appear.
In 2011 Moderna Museet in Stockholm dedicated the whole year to photography.
”Moderna Museet can tell so many stories with its collection, we want to be more experimental and a bit daring. The standard story is always there anyhow… I think that people like the directness of the photographic image.” said Daniel Birnbaum, director at Moderna Museet when La Lettre talked to him in October (La Lettre, 17 October 2011).
Since 2008 Moderna Museet also have an important branch in the city Malmö in the very south of Sweden. This is the venue for yet another photo exhibiton Ladies and Gentlemen! curated by Magnus af Petersens.
Petersens is head of Exhibitions and Collections at Moderna Museet and responsible for the museum’s collection of international art from 1965. In the early 00´s he was chairman of Xposeptember – the Stockholm Photography Festival and introduced photographers like Samuel Fosso, Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibé to the Swedish audience.
Fosso, Keita and Sidibé are now all included in Ladies and Gentlemen! which bears the subtitle The Camera as a Mirror. And this is what the exhibiton´s really focusing on: The camera as a tool to reflect your self or the self you want others to see, the photography studio as a place for masquerades and manipulations, a stage where various identities and roles can be tested.
“An interesting aspect of photographs where the model is consciously posing for the camera is that they tell us something about who the model wants to be or could be. It is a lie that reveals a truth, to use a hackneyed but nonetheless poignant description of art,” says Petersens
Andy Warhol’s polaroids, Ladies and Gentlemen – who lended their title to the exhibition – are clear examples of Warhol’s obsession with celebrities, but also their willingness to play the game. In the world of pop art and popular culture, surface is everything – and even more so today than in the Warhol years.
Cindy Sherman is playing with clichés in another way. She´s literally using the camera as a mirror to explore the various roles she takes on.
“The questions asked especially by Cindy Sherman in her pictures, about identity as a role that we can don, are as valid to many portraits where the models are posing consciously or mirroring themselves in the lens,” Petersens ends.
All the photographs in the exhibition are part of Moderna Museet’s permanent collection and includes, apart from already mentioned artists, works from Tracey Moffatt, Elina Brotherus and Francesco Vezzoli.
Magnus Naddermier
Ladies and Gentlemen! – The Camera as a Mirror
Until April 22, 2012
Moderna Museet Malmö
Gasverksgatan 22
211 29 Malmö
Suède
040-685 79 37
