Created in the fall of 2023, the Vernacular Social Club is an association for the promotion and distribution of vernacular documents. Its objective: to make undocumented photographic archives visible and to bring them to life in France and internationally.
For the Club’s first exhibition in France, La Chambre explores with three founding members of the association the broad theme of family photography. Affaire de famille – Family Affair offers a dive into the history of vernacular photography which takes us into the twists and turns of the daily lives of strangers around the world, through the prism of three collections.
Brought together for the first time: the collection of Lukas Birk, photographer, researcher and editor, known for his work in conflict-affected regions such as Afghanistan and Myanmar; the collection of Jean-Marie Donat, iconophagous artist and publisher, who has been building for more than 30 years a vast photographic corpus (more than 40,000 photographs, ektachromes and negatives) which give a unique reading of the 20th century; the collection of Thomas Sauvin, collector and artist who, with Beijing Silvermine, brings together more than a million anonymous photographs which reconstruct a large part of the history of popular analog photography in China.
Period prints, negatives, identity photos, family portraits, memories of a past time and witnesses of social events, the exhibited groups, with various aesthetic forms, draw and document a large historical fresco of the representation of the family in the East and West of the world. The term family is used here in its broadest sense: we find bonds of alliance, societal representations, historical stories… The power of these clichés lies in their marginal, sometimes paradoxical, sometimes cobbled-together form.
These moments of life, intended to often remain within the family circle, are revealed here as the memory of a time to be preserved, as an archeology of a great collective family story.
Affaire de famille – Family Affair
from November 23, 2024 to January 26, 2025
La Chambre ― espace d’exposition et de formation à l’image
4 place d’Austerlitz
67000 Strasbourg
+33 (0)9 83 41 89 55
www.la-chambre.org
