See/The Time/In Colour at Centre Pompidou Metz

Curated by leading photography specialist Sam Stourdzé, the exhibition recalls the importance of photography in the discovery of the world as we know it.

Overview

See/The Time/In Colour - The Challenges of Photography brings together around 250 works and 50 photographers, offering a unique overview of the major technical challenges that have marked the history of the discipline. It will provide an opportunity to discover exceptional works: from very rare plates showing the restoration of masterpieces from the Italian Renaissance to rarely exhibited seascapes by Gustave Le Gray and autochrome plates from the collection of Albert Kahn recreated for the exhibition.

Optical and mechanical features, chemical procedures, innovative physical properties: for a long time, technology was lumped together with the objective sciences. However, more than just a simple means of photographic production, its developments have paved the way for, or given rise to, all of its most important artistic revolutions.

Divided into three sections, the exhibition examines key issues connected with the reproduced image, the origins of photography, the rise of the snapshot, which enabled the discipline to be considered “modern”, as well as its relationship to colour, a pivotal development that led to an unprecedented democratisation of the practice. In each of these three sections, the photographic work of a particular iconic figure will be showcased: Constantin Brancusi, who hijacked the reproductible function of the image in order to produce hundreds of photographic interpretations of his sculptures; Harold Edgerton, who, in the 1950s, fixed time in the image eventually causing it to break down; and Saul Leiter and Helen Levitt, pioneers of colour photography who through their use of areas of colour transformed reality into a poetic form. Around these figures will emerge a multitude of other artists who have explored unknown facets of photography.

Interweaving periods, the exhibition will bring together the pioneering works of 19th- and 20th-century photographers and those of contemporary artists, from Hans Peter Feldmann, who revisits the camera obscura with his installation Shadow Play as an inaugural form of the reproduced image, to Dove Allouche, Ann Veronica Janssens, Laure Tiberghien and Hugo Deverchère, whose works highlight, throughout the exhibition, the many paths that are still being opened up, even today, by the technical manipulations of the medium.