The End of Paris

© 2012, Peter Marshall

By Sunday lunchtime I was definitely beginning to feel ill, but there were still things that I wanted to see, and after a brief lunch – a mistake – we went on to the Hôtel de Sauroy in rue Charlot in the 3e,where the first thing we saw was a rather curious box in the courtyard. It seemed an odd way to treat the work of Liz Hingley, as the winner of the Prix Virginia for her work on The Jones Family, and certainly did not show it at its best.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

The first show we went inside the rather grand house to see was Thanks to Luigi Ghirri & Italian Emerging Photography. I’ve never really seen what people see in Ghirri’s work, although it’s not entirely without interest, it has never really gripped me. What people see as poetic often seems to me just sloppy thinking and technique, but the work of the six younger Italian photographers held a little more interest.

For me the most striking work were the dark images of Alessandro Imbriaco’s Static Drama, but there was also interest in Marco Barbon’s Asmara Dream, Susanna Pozzoli’s On the Block. Harlem Private View,  Ottavia Castellina‘s Here I am Again,  but I was less than enchanted by Claudia Pozzoli’s lonely mountains of metaphors and perhaps felt I had seen work similar to Margherita Cesaretti’s magic herbarium rather better done by others.

Through a neighbouring door leading to its own staircase we went up into the group show Le temps des lucioles (The time of fireflies) with work by Robert Cahen, Bogdan Konopka, Gladys, Laurent Millet, Sarah Moon, Caroline Hayeur, Machiel Botman, Didier Massard, Patrick Taberna and Salvatore Puglia.

The retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Brave Tin Soldier is one of Sarah Moon’s most charming series, and it was good to see it on the wall. But for me the real star of the show – perhaps because I was not really  familiar with his work before – was Bogdan Konopka.

© 2012, Peter Marshall
I read one of the several books by Konopka at the show

Born in Poland where he was a part of a movement known as ‘elementary photography’ which led him to use a large format camera (mainly I think 4×5″) and work with low contrast heavily printed contact prints as a reaction to the then prevalent style of working, which favoured gritty high contrast and greatly enlarged photojournalistic images. He move to France in 1989.

The images on show demonstrated his approach, small and darkly printed with very little in the highlight area, they had an unusual depth and shadow separation that prevented them from being dull or gloomy.  There were also copies of several of his books, and a comfortable sofa on which to sit and browse through them, so much that I perhaps neglected some of the other work on show which, at a fairly brief encounter failed to arouse my interest.

There is a good selection of work by Konopka on his Candace Dwan gallery page, although unfortunately the reproduction there seems a little unsharp and fails to do the work justice.

© 2012, Peter Marshall
A wall on a street in the 3e

We walked rather briskly down to the Institut Suédois for a quick look at the show Different Distances, showing the work of a new generation of Swedish fashion photographers whose work has a free interpretation of fashion and is also fine art photography. Or so I think the exhibition description said, though to me it all looked rather ordinary. But by now I was really feeling quite ill, and although there were more shows I had meant to visit I had to give up and return to the hotel.

More pictures from Paris shortly on My London Diary.

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