POP UP! For five days, from the 1st to the 5th of June 2016, the photographer cooperative PICTURETANK is invading the Gare de Marlon gallery in Paris. This time, the cooperative asked Michel Poverty, photography historian, critic, teacher at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and multiplier of expressions, to put up photographs he selected . This is how he brought out an unexpected facet, about which he told us in an interview.
For thirteen years, Picturetank has consisted of 150 photographers, some of them from collectives. This week, there is an exhibition, a public installation during the opening (in partnership with printer Philippe Guilvard who produces photos on site), a photo sale, portfolio reviews, book signings, and discussions with photographers.
Last year, the management of the agency discreetly changed, with a swarming, energetic team and the collaboration of photographers who, alone or in the collective, put together projects as varied as they are coherent. Michel Poivert, an external curator, was invited by the agency to bring a surprising, new look, on what we know of the agency’s icons and what we expect from photographers. He spent a month analyzing a part of the archives to extract a theme: La Maison et le Monde (Home and the World). While moving from “corpus to opus”, according to the curator’s words, it’s a photographic body, embodied by the generation of photographers emanating from it. It is a frame within a frame, an observation of man on his work, territory. The title of the exhibition symbolically makes a reference to a Satyajit Ray film. It would be fitting to affix a subtitle from a Rémy Belvaux film, “It happened in your neighborhood.”
“La Maison et le Monde” is a huge program seen as a gallery of portraits. That is how one should take on this meditative offer to newly selected photographs from the archive; it should be an invitation to find images and photographers where we don’t expect them. It is a series of portraits of inhabitants and portraits of cities and landscapes. Above all, it’s about looking at our society and at those, so close, next door. It is a photographic corpus which reflects the tastes of someone evoking an “optic ventriloquy”. Let’s hope that this opus will be the first of a long series.
EXHIBITION
La Maison et le Monde
Picturetank, vu par Michel Poivert, critique
et Philippe Guilvard, tireur
From June 1st to June 5th, 2016
Galerie Gare de Marlon
19, rue de la Verrerie
75003 Paris
From Wednesday to Sunday from 11am to 7pm
Tél. : 09 67 26 26 46
http://www.garedemarlon.com
