Les Douches la Galerie presents its new group exhibition, “Dans ma cuisine”, curated by Éric Rémy. He introduces it as follows:
A tight focus on two hanging keys, a container, a sponge, four objects hanging on a white wall, and some ceramic tiles… This photograph by Daniel Masclet, dated 1939, is intriguing. It asserts its banality both through its subject matter and through the title given by its author: In My Kitchen. Nothing exotic, no promise of elsewhere, no decisive event or moment to capture. Daniel Masclet draws our attention to a seemingly insignificant corner of his apartment, he asks us to look differently, to linger on this arrangement of everyday objects without apparent aesthetic value. This photograph is the starting point of our exhibition – which takes up the same title – to understand how and why cooking and culinary art, with what they contain, have become over the decades a subject of interest for photographers.
La Table servie 1 (circa 1823-30), one of the first photographs in the history of the medium, attributed to Nicéphore Niépce (perhaps in collaboration with Louis Daguerre), has as its subject bottles, a glass, a spoon, a knife, a piece of bread all arranged on a white tablecloth on a table. Niépce then adopted for his subject the codes of still life, in force in painting, in his search to develop a new process. This first attempt to record reality would be continued by photographers of the second half of the 19th century (Charles Aubry, Adophe Braun, Charles Carey, etc.). These photographers would exercise their talent through inanimate and docile objects but rather favored bouquets of flowers, still lifes with skulls, hanging rabbits and pheasants or other accumulations of antiques and sculptures, thus remaining within the codes of fine arts.
Two icons from the history of photography in the 1930s quickly come to mind when we associate cooking and photography: André Kertész’s fork (1928) and Edward Weston’s pepper (1930). These two images are the heirs and at the same time a turning point in the art of still life photography. As Sylvie Aubenas and Dominique Versavel point out in the book Objet dans l’objectif2, the 20th century, with the upside-down urinal or Marcel Duchamp’s bottle rack, “heralds the changes of the new century: rejection of conventional subjects of art, multiple readings of the object, the latter’s preponderant place in the visual landscape of the interwar period, renewal of artistic language through the use of photography, among other things.”
Manufactured objects related to cooking (cups, glasses, carafes, plates, kitchen utensils, molds, etc.) are mass-produced, invade everyday life, and establish themselves as modern subjects for photographers. For various reasons (advertising commissions, personal work, research, illustration, etc.), photographers use the kitchen as a research laboratory — the kitchen of Eileen Gray’s villa E 127 revisited by Stéphane Couturier —, a resource of forms, objects, materials, a territory to explore where each utensil, each food item stimulates the photographer’s visual and creative appetite, and challenges his imagination (photograms of pasta by Henri Foucault, the banana pear by Denis Darzacq).
The kitchen is a cavern of a thousand possibilities, a treasure trove of study subjects: glasses and their impossible transparency (Willy Zielke, Valérie Belin), colanders and their mysterious shadows (Patrick Bailly-Maître-Grand), cutlery and their enigmatic reflections (Maurice Tabard, Alain Fleischer, Patrick Tosani), tableware and their geometric patterns (François Kollar, Gaston Paris), molds with poetic shapes (Elizabeth Lennard, Sabine Weiss). So many objects are revealed differently in analog photography. In the 1950s, Daniel Masclet, a critic and theorist of photography, seemed to be giving a nod to the history of the medium with his laid table, a still life evocative of that of the inventor of photography mentioned above. Roger Catherineau transforms sprouted potatoes into monstrous insects, and Raymond Journeaux creates geometric shapes from eggs.
Eric Rémi, Exhibition Curator
1 Probably produced using the physautotype process, fixed and preserved, but the original has disappeared.
2 Object in the Lens from Nadar to Doisneau, Sylvie Aubenas and Dominique Versavel, BNF, 2005, p. 16.
With works by Patrick Bailly-Maître-Grand, Aurel Bauh, Valérie Belin, Anna & Bernhard Blume, Thomas Boivin, Roger Catherineau, Yvonne Chevalier, Stéphane Couturier, Denis Darzacq, Émeric Feher, Alain Fleischer, Henri Foucault, René-Jacques, Raymond Journeaux, Michel Journiac, André Kertész, François Kollar, Elizabeth Lennard, Daniel Masclet, André Papillon, Gaston Paris, Irving Penn, Bernard Plossu, August Sander, André Steiner, Patrick Tosani, Raoul Ubac, Romain Urhausen, Ghislaine Vappereau, Sabine Weiss and Willy Zielke.
Dans ma cuisine
from April 11 to July 31, 2025
Les Douches la Galerie
5 Rue Legouvé
75010 Paris, France
www.lesdoucheslagalerie.com
