The School Gallery has just opened its latest exhibition, Meet my Mum by the photographer Sacha Goldberger. This new series, composed of seventeen works, will be on display until December 19, 2015.
The seventeen photographic tableaux plunge us into a cinematic dreamscape of a 1950s’ America that time has forgotten. We seem to be strolling through Edward Hopper’s paintings or wandering through an episode of Mad Men. Men and women are found in the middle of a hallway or a hotel room, a waiting room or an office, a library, a warehouse, a kitchen, a bathroom, in their backyard or at an abandoned swimming pool. Whether they are reading, taking a shower, getting dressed, working, or playing cricket, they appear estranged from where they are, from others, and from the world. They are like sleepwalkers frozen in time.
There is no smile on their lips, and their eyes emanate a blend of melancholy and fatality. Their mothers hang on to their backs, dressed in nightgowns, raincoats, or Chanel. Sometimes, it’s the father who hangs on to his daughter’s or his son’s neck, because fathers are also mothers like everyone else. The parents’ feet never touch the ground. They float like helium balloons held in one’s hand. They are light as feathers and yet weigh a ton. They are secret presences that no one can see except those who are looking for them. In a word, us.
Sacha Goldberger photographs solitude, immense tenderness, and the burden of one’s family ties. He photographs in the way that one shoots a film sequence: with framing, stage sets, lights and shadows; he directs a storyline, an open-ended scenario. And it is our own story that comes to life: suddenly, it is our own mother and our own father that we feel clutching on to our bodies, to our existence, to our childhood memories. If time carries away only souls, if it creates a great degree of dependency, it is powerless against love that never dies, against love as great as this.
Julie Estève
EXHIBITION
Meet my Mum by Sacha Goldberger
From 28th October to 19th December 2015
School Gallery / Olivier Castaing
322 rue Saint Martin
75003 Paris
Tél. 01 42 71 78 20
