Exhibition MAGNUM. 10 SEQUENCES How cinema inspires photographers 23.04.08 – 07.09.08 INDEX 1.- Fact sheet ........................................................................ 2 2.- Presentation ..................................................................... 3 3.- Exhibition plan .................................................................. 4 4.- The 10 photographers...................................................... 14 1.- Fact sheet MAGNUM. 10 SEQUENCES How cinema inspires photographers , is an exhibition co-produced by the CCCB and the Cinémathèque française, in collaboration with Magnum Photos and sponsored by El País. Curators Diane Dufour, special projects director at Magnum Photos. Serge Toubiana, CEO of the Cinémathèque française. Dates Cinémathèque française 4 April 2007 – 30 July 2007 Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB) 23 April 2008 – 7 September 2008 Venue Room 3, CCCB Venue design Lluís Pera / Espais Efímers Graphics Lali Almonacid www.almonacidestudi.com Coordination Anna Escoda Montalegre, 5 08001 Barcelona Tel : 93 306 41 00 Fax: 93 306 41 01 2 2.- Presentation The Barcelona Centre of Contemporary Culture presents the exhibition MAGNUM. 10 SEQUENCES How cinema inspires photographers , an exhibition co-produced by the CCCB and the Cinémathèque française, in collaboration with Magnum Photos and sponsored by El País. The exhibition invites 10 photographers from the agency MAGNUM, representing the different generations and different schools of documentary photography, to evoke the influence of cinema in their imagery. The results are ten original works, including photographs and multimedia installations, in which the photographers show how a particular producer, film or scene has left an imprint in their psyche or in their work . In parallel to this exhibition, a series of activities are being held which explore the relationship between cinema and photography: the workshop “Film, capture, exhibit” targeted at all audiences between 6 May and 31 July, and the series of conferences and projections “Under the Influence” from 25 June to 23 July. The exhibition, which was displayed in the Cinémathèque française between 4 April and 30 July, can be visited at the CCCB between 23 April and 7 September 2008. The curators are Diane Dufour, special projects director at Magnum Photos and Serge Toubiana, CEO of the Cinémathèque française. “The image to come” is an expression coined by Henri Cartier-Bresson to define filmmaking. According to Cartier-Bresson, cinema is always what comes next: not the image that is being viewed or projected onto the screen, but the next one, taken as a progression. Could the opposite also hold true, that cinema acts as an “image that came before”, inspiring the photographer while he captures reality? How does cinema infiltrate the photographer’s imagination? To what extent does the photographer project his dreams, fantasies, and obsessions onto the world? Ten photographers from the Magnum Photos agency, from different generations, representing various trends in documentary photography today. They revealed to us how a director, film, or scene left an imprint in the labyrinth of their psyche and how this imprint in turn affected or influenced their work. Taking on board the legacy of another view, or even better: vindicating it. Deeply buried images superimpose themselves on the film of life: a way of framing what happens, “under influence”. Transition, infiltration, and superimposition narrow down the complicity between the two media. Cinema creates the illusion of the real so that the spectator cannot doubt its verisimilitude; photography draws on the imagination to re-establish the truth of lived experience. Standing at the frontier between the true and the false, the certain and the uncertain, the just and the unjust. The ultimate possibility for recounting a reality that is mobile, evasive, on which we cannot get a re-take. “We know that under the image which is revealed, there is another one, more faithful to reality, and under this other one, there is yet another, and on it goes. Right up to the image of absolute reality, mysterious, that no one will ever see.” (Michelangelo Antonioni) Diane Dufour and Serge Toubiana Curators 3 3.- Exhibition plan ABBAS Paisà by Roberto Rossellini (1946) As an adolescent, Abbas saw Roberto Rossellini’s feature film in a film club in Algeria, which at the time was being ravaged by the war of independence. It immediately became one of his favourite films. In the exhibition, he juxtaposes extracts from Paisà (shot in the Italy of the 1940s) with his photographic record in black and white of the Iranian revolution, as seen from the inside. Scenes as varied as they are tragic explain the convulsive life of Teheran between 1978 and 1980 (riots, lynching, protests, arrests and other civil war events). A series of 18 photographs of identical format is presented, forming a continuous line. Two large-format video projections, showing clips from the Rossellini film, run above and below this line of images. The clips, projected mute, explicitly play on similarities in theme or aesthetics with the photos surrounding them. It is as though the very essence of humanity surpassed the time and geographical differences between the Rossellini film and Abbas’ photos, both testimonies of the helplessness of their country of birth. These are individuals rebelling against the collective destiny of a nation on the verge of chaos, with a backdrop of ambiguity as we step from documentary into fiction (Abbas) and from fiction to documentary (Rossellini). “When I was a young student, I discovered Paisà in the film club I was a member of. I watched many films but this one moved me. It talks of heroism, nationalism and war. A war that was lived intensely from day to day. It became a fetish film for me, reinforcing my decision to become a journalist and subsequently a photographer. At that time, the documentary dimensions of Rossellini’s film moved me greatly: what differentiated this film from all the others was its realism.” Abbas Teheran. 11 February 1979. Revolutionaries Paisà by Roberto Rossellini (1946) stop a suspected member of the SAVAK, ©Films sans frontières the Xa’s political police. © Abbas /Magnum Photos / Contact 4 ANTOINE D’AGATA Aka Ana This section contains images with a high sexual content that may offend some viewers. Admission is not allowed to visitors under 18 years of age. Antoine d’Agata wrote a ‘documentary screenplay’ inspired by Oshima’s Empire of the Senses , then shot it during a four-month stay in Japan between September and December 2006. He himself is the principal character. The film, called Aka Ana , lasts around 20 minutes and was shot on digital video. It is made up of moving images and photographs taken during filming: a private, autobiographical diary exploring the transgression, joy and violence of his nights in Japan. The idea of the installation is to combine still images with animated images, thereby creating a puzzle that traces once again a sensorial experience. The two regimes of images form a sole material and merge to form a single flow. As a photographer, I cannot deny reality with impunity, or just affirm it. I cannot, in fact, escape it, nor can I subject myself to it. The Only way out: a slow agony under the stamp of conscience and irony. I renounce rhetoric and I give critical information on my transgressions, between the form and the material, the spirit and the flesh, the look and the experience. Antoine D’Agata Japan, 2004 ©Antoine D’Agata / Magnum Photos / Contact 5 BRUCE GILDEN American film-noir Bruce Gilden juxtaposes extracts from American film noir movies with his urban portraits taken in New York, which are in keeping with the tradition of street photography. The visitor stands before a wall composed of portraits and two large-format screens where clips from the films are projected. When the clip comes to an end, the image is frozen (giving the impression that it is a still shot), whilst, one after the other, different tracks are played with dialogues, sounds and film-noir music, located and directed at the Bruce Gilden images. As you see, we’ re flying over an island. This city. A particular city. And this is a story of a number of people. And a story also of the city itself. It was not photographed in a studio. Quite the contrary, Barry Fitzgerald, our star, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart, Don Taylor, Ted de Corsia and the other actors, played out their roles on the streets, in the apartment houses, in the skyscrapers of New York itself. And along with them, a great many thousand New Yorkers played out their roles also. This is the city as it is. Hot summer pavements, the children at play, the buildings in their naked stone, the people without makeup. Prologue to Naked City , Jules Dassin (1948) Extract chosen by Bruce Gilden for his installation New York, 1989 Pick up on South Street by Samuel Fuller (1953) © Bruce Gilden /Magnum Photos / Contact ©Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved 6 HARRY GRUYAERT Michelangelo Antonioni Harry Gruyaert, a leading exponent of colour urban landscape photography, presents, in the form of projections, photographs taken over several decades in different places (Paris, Beijing, Los Angeles, Marrakech and Benares). The sequence of photographs follows a harmonious rhythm and the image relations are clearly poetic. The sequences divided by locations shatter and, as a result, the subjective links lead the visitor to sense a kind of suspense. The size of the screen enables the artist to simultaneously project different photos, like a contact sheet suspended in space. Benches have been placed in front of the screen to enhance viewing. Amongst these images of such intense composition, brief clips of Antonioni films glide surreptitiously in slow motion, around the idea of the solitude of man in the city. Clips chosen for their unnerving strangeness, where nothing can be seen easily: fragments, surprising places, distant characters who wander around spaces of colour, uncertain sounds that cannot be discerned as either noise or music.