A circuit dedicated to women photographers

A curation by Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska

Within the scope of the political campaign they lead in favour of the visibility of women photographers, the Ministry of Cultural Affairs has presented, over the last three years and in association with Paris Photo, a dedicated circuit: Elles X Paris Photo.

This year, to make up for the cancellation of the 2020 edition of Paris Photo at the Grand Palais due to health restrictions, the circuit is going digital: ellesxparisphoto.com.

Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska, curator of the Centre Pompidou’s Photography Center, took on its curation. To do so, she gathered around 40 women photographers – young, experienced, unknown, or whose careers have marked the history of photography.

Organised in five themes – luminous images, dreamt images, transformed images, militant images and testament images – the project builds imaginary bridges, highlighting the proximity between generations, sensitivities and aesthetic choices.

This website presents all artists from the circuit, including around 30 photographers interviewed on their status as women artists, their commitments, their inspirations. For ten of them, like Ira Lombardia there is a filmed interview in addition to their words. The website also presents infographics on women in photography in France, using updated numbers from studies from the Ministry of Cultural affairs: salaries, professions, studies, prizes, editions, presence in fairs, collections, exhibitions and festivals.

How did you become a photographer? Would you define yourself as a one?

My first encounter with photography was pretty amateurish. As many of us, my first contact was at home. I used to have a toy camera, and I loved to play with it. It could not even make images, but I was engaged in the act of taking photographs.

My father had some cameras at home. I still preserve a Polaroid camera and one of the first Sony digital cameras that was out in the market. I started to take photographs in a pretty natural way. At some point, in the university, I decided to learn more about photography and took photos of my family and friends. I never thought at that point that I would work in something related to art or photography… Which is why no, I do not consider myself as a photographer. I’d feel more comfortable with the “visual artist” label if I had to pick one.

What drives you as a photographer?

I barely take pictures… I’m not interested in taking photos, I’m more interested in how photography is produced, distributed and consumed, in the dynamics, in the flow, in the invisible part. I’m also interested in the meaning of images working as a group, as a cluster, in the gaps, the interstice between them.

In 2012, I decided to remove all the images from my website and commence a symbolic Visual Strike. For a thousand days people would only find a text explaining this lack of images. The commitment of not distributing any image brought me the opportunity to understand my photographic production in a new way. Since then, I have been interested in all the facts surrounding photography that are not the image itself. For me, photography is not about the visual content, it is about much more. I’m interested in working with the idea of dematerialization, to discuss issues that revolve around contemporary iconic super-habit and the impact of seventies appropriation on the dominant digital visual culture.

In 2018, at the Aby Warburg Institute in London, I discovered a metal filing cabinet that contained numerous glass transparencies. Diagrams, drawings and photographs appeared on the slides that made reference to topics such as proportion, psychology or art. Without an established order, or any documentation and even with different sizes I was finally able to connect several images that seemed to refer to the same lecture.

The first slide reproduced the cover of the book “The Perception of the Visual World”. The manuscript, work of the American psychologist James J. Gibson, was published in 1950, and actually the book was at the Warburg Library. The text raises a disruptive and experimental thesis on the way we perceive images, a critical proposal with the dominant idea of ​​cognitivism. This line of research would be known as “visual ecology”, and Gibson was the highest representative. Many of the book’s photographs were in fact reproduced on the glass slides that I found at the Institute; in addition, there were also other images on art history or even a couple slides that looks like “memes” that did not appear in the book and that were presumably intended to introduce a stroke of humor to keep the audience’s attention. There were also two slides referring to a second book, Eye, Film and Camera in color Photography, by R.M. Evans, and an extra one from the same author but different book, “Introduction to color”.

Despite having the books itself and handwritten notes on each of the slides, there was no way of knowing which was the speech that ordered and connected those images: there was no numbering or established order, and without any recording or phonographic file was impossible to know. It was an anomaly, a “speechless” lecture.

Was the conference a summary of Gibson’s book or was it a critique of his controversial work? Was it Gibson himself who gave the talk? Or was it Gombrich or maybe Gertrud Bing? How could those images make sense? The only thing that seemed clear to me is that the materiality of these slides printed on glass paradoxically conflicted with the immaterial nature of a lost speech, with those forgotten words, with an extinct discourse that once gave them meaning seven decades ago.

DOSSIER SPEACHLESS