In the past, international art fair Paris Photo has been a little guilty of hero worship. Throughout its history, the annual event has welcomed the big denizens of the photography business as the headline act. And they have almost always been middle-aged men used to breezing through the industry. The acclaim at the Grand Palais has usually been lavish.
"This year, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, we decided to do something different," the artistic director of the fair, Christopher Wiesner told Refinery29. That "something different" turned out to be the first edition of Curiosa, a group exhibition curated by Martha Kirszenbaum.
It is a welcome antidote. Paris Photo is giving its biggest stage to predominantly female and LGBT artists who have never, until now, been properly recognised or acknowledged. The group exhibition, Kirszenbaum says, aims to "challenge our gaze on the fantasised and fetishised body".
"I worked on the basis that the body is political," Kirszenbaum said during a tour of the show. "I hope to ask us to reflect on our relationships to power, subservience and domination."
Curiosa includes historical works by male artists, who, using the female form, have also been capable of interrogating the male gaze. It includes female artists who were using erotic and sensual imagery to say something more broadly about their sense of self, their aspirations for self-expression and their ideals of freedom. And it includes strikingly modern interpretations of lost, archival and vernacular photographs.
Opening today and covering 210 square metres of the main floor under the balcony of the Grand Palais' Salon d’Honneur, female and queer artists who have largely been ignored by the photography industry, and often faced censorship in their own cultures, are finally getting top billing. About time.
"Tendres Caresses"
Renate Bertlmann
The reality that sexuality isn’t a polarised thing, that gender isn’t cleanly separated between "man" and "woman" – that a vast sea of nuance exists in between – has only really been acknowledged in this decade.
But Renate Bertlmann, working in the 1980s, was making work that was strikingly (to use a modern term) non-binary.
Her work would often include phallic imagery amid images of the female body. She would often borrow from pornography or contraception, using such imagery as a way of interrogating gender and sex in a world happy to aggressively commercialise such things. As evidenced in Curiosa, she even posed sex dolls in classic domestic scenes – having dinner or sleeping on separate sides of the bed.
Tendres caresses, 1976- - 2009 © Renate Bertlmann
"Untitled"
Jo Ann Callis
Jo Ann Callis was born in Ohio, in 1940. By the age of 23, she was living in California with her first husband and two small children. In the mornings, her husband would go to work, her kids to school, and she would be expected to stick around, do the dishes, tend to the home and wait for her family to return.
Her photography was, in its early stages, kept entirely secret. Her husband didn’t know she would take these self-self-portraits in their home during the day until, years later, she found the confidence to show them to a mentor. She first exhibited her work 10 years after it was made at the Woman’s Building, a hub for feminists in downtown Los Angeles.
Callis' self-portraits are a playful, knowing and irreverent take on the ironies of her life. But they’re notable for the fraught use of constrictions – twine, belts, tape are wrapped around her body – offering an intensely personal insight into her desires, frustrations and anxieties.
Untitled from Early Color portfolio – 1976, © Jo Ann Callis courtesy
"Sao Paulo"
Antoine d'Agata
d'Agata is a complex photographer and his presence here, I imagine, would not necessarily be welcomed by many of those who define themselves as feminist.
Born in Marseilles, Antoine d’Agata left France in 1983, living primarily between New York and London. In the early '90s he took courses at the International Center of Photography, where his teachers included Larry Clark and Nan Goldin.
Clark and Goldin’s inspiration is clear. There’s a strange paradox between the distance and closeness of his images, his involvement in and removal from his subjects.
It's perfectly possible to talk of a d’Agata image in relation to a Vermeer or Munch painting, such is his use of light and colour through exposure and contrast. He has an ability to create nightmarish images of a zombified, animalistic people. Yet, purely aesthetically, they are beautiful.
His images often combine aggressive, carnal sex with drug use. The women included in his pictures are often impoverished, from the lower rungs of the developing world. He wrests any control from the women he photographs, demanding they succumb their bodies entirely to his image. A member of Magnum Photos, he is ostensibly a documentary photographer, despite his willingness to dress up his images in ostentatious art-speak. But should we censor such images? Is it not art’s purpose to reflect on the lives of others, however bleak?
Sao Paulo - 2009 © Antoine d'agata
"A Heartless Room"
Kenji Ishiguro
Kenji Ishiguro will always be known for his photographs of Hiroshima’s rehabilitation after the atom bomb.
He visited the once-devastated city 20 times between March and August 1965, 20 years after the explosion, capturing on the streets of the city an array of private, intimate moments and everyday oddities. But also, always built into the frame were the visual scars from the weapon of mass destruction.
"I had no intention whatsoever to take photographs that demonstrate the misery caused by the atomic bomb," he once wrote. Ishiguro’s photographs showed a people determined to continue with their lives – to work hard, have kids, get drunk, have sex and fall in love. The photographs reflect a period of instability and upheaval, a rearrangement and liberalisation. Yet they also reflect a city, and a culture, whose terrible memory was very much alive.
"A Heartless Room" might be seen to reflect this. The curved beauty of the model’s body is complicated by the subject’s willingness to hide her face from the camera. What, we wonder, is she thinking?
A heartless room - 1976 © Kenji Ishiguro
"If, Thee Shoo-T Fits A-T... "Where is I.T.?"
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge was born Neil Andrew Megson in February 1950 in Manchester.
To the bewilderment of his teachers, parents and most people who came into contact with him in the Manchester and Birmingham of the 1960s, Megson developed a fascination with occultism and its presence in avant-garde art while at Solihull School. Megson dropped out of the University of Hull to move into a countercultural commune in Hackney, London, where he became known as Genesis P-Orridge.
There he met Christine Carol Newby, who went by Cosey Fanni Tutti. The pair fell in love, founded the experimental band Throbbing Gristle, and created highly explicit photographs, collaged in a way that expressed their relationship, based in a sense of opposition to the mainstream. Tutti would shoot pornographic film and model for magazines, incorporating the images of herself into the collages. It was a deliberate and conscious embrace of commercial image production to create something much more personal, and much more complex.
If, Thee Shoo-T Fits A-T... "Where is I.T.? - 1999 © Genesis Breyer p-orridge
"Consumer Art"
Natalia LL
In the 1970s, in the conservative and patriarchal Eastern Bloc, a new wave of female artists started to use and project their own bodies in radical and transformative ways. Natalia LL was at the forefront of what has become known as feminist actionism – a way of using the camera performatively to take control of one’s body, to treat it like a canvas, to use it to express freedom and possibility. We now recognise such acts with daily familiarity – a simple selfie, the basic fibre of everyone’s Instagram feed. But Natalia LL and her contemporaries saw the provocative selfie as a political tool, a challenge to the powers that be, an assertion of their rights as young women in a disapproving and controlling world.
Consumer Art - 1974, © Natalia LL
"Mirror Study"
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
One of the only contemporary artists in the exhibition, LA-based Mpagi Sepuya's use of his studio, intermingling his own body with those of collaborators, models and friends, is reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s Factory – a space to explore the aesthetics of what it means to be a non-binary black man in multicultural America. The influences of Robert Mapplethorpe and, more pressingly, Rotimi Fani Koyade are apparent in his ability to aestheticise and beautify the nether regions of his own body. Yet the collaging effect reflects a constant negotiation – a pluralist exchange between himself, his subjects and the viewer. They speak strongly of a young man working through who he is meant to be, and how to get there.
Mirror Study – 2017, © Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Yancey Richardson, Team Gallery, and Document
"Hommage à Pierre M"
Edouard Taufenbach
The contemporary French artist Edouard Taufenbach transforms anonymous, archival sexualised photographs through collage, manipulating and multiplying the original to create huge and dramatic compositions.
His series Spéculaire uses images from the Sebastien Lifshitz collection, an archive built up from scouring Paris' flea markets over three decades. Taufenbach has found moments of caught hedonism and multiplied, fragmented and rearranged them to become, as he says, "objects of visual fantasies".
Hommage à Pierre M, SPECULAR series – 2018, © Edouard TaufenbachLike what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?
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