Lynne Cohen. Double aveugle 1970 – 2012 (Double blind 1970-2012) travels, for the first time in France, the whole of the work of Lynne Cohen (1944 – 2014), Canadian artist, major representative of contemporary photography.
“Double-aveugle”(Double-blind): this is the name, in medical research, of the experimental method where the researcher and the tested subject do not know if the latter receives the active ingredient or a placebo. Intended to rule out any perception bias, this amazing process is necessary for any clinical protocol. By this set of equations with unknown terms only, the seeker can hope to approach the most exact truth of the facts.
This paradoxical scientific approach, where subject and observer do not control what is happening, Lynne Cohen has seized to apply it to the photographic survey, to report, with remarkable consistency during of his forty years of career, decorations among which lives the human species in the contemporary Western world.
Meticulously, with optics as an empirical process and the silver print as a research paper, Lynne Cohen sets the image of man-made spaces, but empty of all presence, vacant but impenetrable, destined for a clearly precise use but enigmatic. These views of a strange world, familiar and mysterious, sharp in form and vague in the background, all pretense and mise en abyme, question more than they reveal the nature of the spaces that surround us. Produced in the photographic chamber by a process of double image inversion, they tend a mirror: what are these places where we live, but whose meaning escapes us? What does their staging mean?
Faced with these photographs, deprived of any clue to interpret them, we remain ignorant of what is played before us as in a trial “double-blind”. Then arises a dizzying question: in this artistic investigation, and in the world that the photographer presents us, are we subject or object?
Lynne Cohen’s photographic examination of contemporary sets proposes a reflection on the status of the image coupled with a critique of the place of the individual in today’s society. In the era of “fake news” and all-powerful screens, his work finds deep relevance, and strongly demonstrates the power of photographic art to bear witness to its time.
Lynne Cohen – Double Blind 1970 – 2012
June 27, 22 Sept. 2019
Popular Pavilion
Esplanade Charles-de-Gaulle
34000 Montpellier
