Sabine Weiss, Nathalie Boutté and Tamara Janes at Photo Elysée

Photo Elysée celebrates the centenary of Sabine Weiss alongside the innovative dialogue of visual artist Nathalie Boutté, while Set And Setting by Tamara Janes humorously explores the complex interplay between high and popular culture.

Overview

Hommage by Sabine Weiss and Nathalie Boutté

To celebrate the centenary of the birth of Sabine Weiss, Photo Elysée is presenting an exhibition devoted to the photographer who passed away in 2021, and has invited visual artist Nathalie Boutté (France, 1967) to dialogue with her photographs. Whereas Sabine Weiss built up her body of work by photographing the street and filling orders in her studio, Nathalie Boutté does not take photos but, instead, meticulously cuts out strips of paper on which she prints a text. She then recomposes the images from which she drew her inspiration by assembling the paper strips, thus recreating the work in volume. The images, consisting of strips that create gradations of gray when text is present – in this case, quotations from Sabine Weiss – are revealed as the viewer gradually moves away from them.  

By opening its archives to Nathalie Boutté, Photo Elysée reveals a little-known side of Sabine Weiss's career, in particular, her studio work. Established in Paris in 1946, the photographer, a major figure in humanist photography, was driven by an insatiable curiosity about her medium. The exhibition reveals some of the 200,000 negatives and 7,000 contact sheets that make up her collection, received in 2017.  

Photo Elysée boasts one of the world's largest collections dedicated to photography. It covers the entire history of the medium, from its invention in the 19th century to the digital technologies. At Photo Elysée, Sabine Weiss takes her place with other great names in photography, including René Burri, Leonard Freed, Henriette Grindat, Monique Jacot, Lehnert & Landrock and Ella Maillart. 

The exhibition is supported by the Fondation Coromandel and by Kering | Women In Motion.

Set And Setting by Tamara Janes

Janes is fascinated by how we see, question, and change the post-modern conditions of the image. She addresses these issues by utilising a unique blend of high-culture and popular culture sources that captivate audiences and humorously expose both profound and mundane aspects of contemporary visual culture. A large part of the exhibition shows bodies of work she made after researching the New York Public Library Picture Collection in 2018. It acts as a source of images for her, which she later organizes, adjusts, recontextualizes and modifies based on her artistic preferences.