2023-12-24 06:15:04
“Immigrants, Istanbul, Turkey” (circa 1977), by Mary Ellen Mark. THE MARY ELLEN MARK FOUNDATION
The exhibition “Black & White. An aesthetic of photography” at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) is a return: scheduled for 2020, but canceled due to the Covid-19 epidemic, it was hung at the Grand Palais, in Paris, then taken down without so that the public can see it. Here she is back, repatriated to the BNF, since the Grand Palais is currently under construction.
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Vast subject if ever there was one, “Black & White. An aesthetics of photography” above all gives the opportunity to revisit the BNF’s photography collections since their beginnings. And to take out of the reserves a number of historical treasures, signed by great authors who are masters of contrast and composition: Gustave Le Gray, Paul Strand, Frank Horvat, Bernard Plossu, Brassaï… You should not shy away from your pleasure, so much can be found on the splendor picture rails and careful prints: an almost black photo of Harry Callahan with his wife emerging from the shadows, a landscape as if cut with scissors by Pierre de Fenoÿl, a velvety shell by Edward Weston…
In this extensive exhibition, with more than 300 photographs by 206 authors, arranged by theme and not chronologically, the idea of the four curators of the BNF was to show how black and white, this non-choice initially made for technical or even economic reasons, then becomes an aesthetic bias and a support for creativity. The introduction is rather successful: if we often imagine that black and white was born with photography, the exhibition quickly disabuses us.
Chocolate and ivory
In the 19th century, the first images tended to take on brown, sepia, bistre and bluish tones. The superb Big wave by Le Gray (1857) is neither black nor white, rather chocolate and ivory. It is the gelatin-silver bromide print, dominant throughout the 20th century, which will give the taste of “real” black. As the catalog points out, the very expression “black and white” to designate monochrome photography only appeared when color photography became popular, in the 1930s, with processes like Kodachrome – making black and white a real choice.
“The Great Wave – This [Sète] » (1857), by Gustave Le Gray. GUSTAVE LE GRAY
And it is this particular aesthetic, this assumed bias that the rest of the exhibition seeks to explore, by highlighting what lovers of black and white cherish in this particular representation of the world: the ability to accentuate the contrast of objects, to emphasize the composition, to make the light palpable. Modernists, in particular, took advantage of it to highlight the lines and geometric designs that characterize the modern city, to the point of making an abstraction of them – like Germaine Krull who photographed bridges and the Eiffel Tower in her book Metal (1928).
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