Lise Sarfati à la Photographers' Gallery, Londres
Le 2011-10-05 18:29:09

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LaPhotographers' Gallery présente « The American Series », une exposition de Lise Sarfati : 50 photographies en couleurprises lors d'un travail récent aux Etats-Unis et un diaporama de 69 images. Un livre est prévu en octobre 2005 chez Twin Palm. Jusqu'au 31 juillet 2005. Entrée libre. Consulter le lien Horaires d'ouverture : du lundi au samedi de 11h à 18h. Nocturne le jeudi de 11h à 20h. Le dimanche de 12h à 18h. Lise Sarfati achieved widespread acclaim for an arresting series of photographs in the 1990's created in Russian cities, including Moscow, Norilsk and Vorkuta. A fluent Russian speaker, Sarfati focused in this body of work on a kind of brutal ‘bohemia,' and the intensity of life in the midst of post-Soviet decay. Those images proved her to be a sensitive andimaginative observer – of dread-filled, decaying industrial sites that serve as metaphors for chronic loss and waste, and of physically and socially ostracized young people. Sarfati is a photographer with a tenacious capacity for shifting her photographic antennaeand adopting multiple understandings of a place and its society. Her work plays an important part in today's debates about the uses and visual languages of socially engagedphotography, in that she stubbornly resists ‘objectifying' the subjects that she is compelled to photograph. Her sense of curiosity is profoundly intuitive, and profoundly human.In thisnew series of portraits from the United States, Sarfati consciously undermines any desire for or expectation of a single or defining perspective upon complex social ideas. Herphotographs are much more concerned with activating a connection – via aesthetics and the intensity of her encounters with her subjects – with our world on a much moreimmediate and less quasi-informational way. To call Sarfati's latest series as simply a selection of ‘portraits of teenagers' would be an oversimplification that assumes an immediate contraposition to the subjects. Sarfati's photographic investigations into the young people that she encountered in shopping malls and streets and homes in the United States are not intended as projectionsof an adult onto a remembered period of earlier life. There's little sense here that this series of images is the result of Sarfati's choreographing young people into the usual photographicallegories of dislocation or disenfranchisement, regardless of the actual situations or states of minds of these individuals.If anything, she has unlocked mutual experiences ofuncertainty--wrapped up in the mainly nonverbal, not-fully-determined or explained way in which she conducts each of her photographic portrayals. Sarfati's subtle visualizations of the passions and frustrations of these young people – all onthe cusp of adult responsibility – in Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Oregon, and California – might be misread as the latest addition to photography's recent near-obsession with thishighly photogenic stage of life. Her subject, however, is not youth or “teenagerhood” per se, but the possibility of that period of life, during which emotions are close to the surfaces,reminding us all of the individuality, vulnerability, and also fortitude that we all carry. She acknowledges her attraction to lives that are being shaped by the paradoxes of where wecome from and our aspirations of where we are heading, and she understands that the investigation of such lives is most likely to be possible in sites of massive social shift as wellas in the physical manifestations of selfhood that young people consciously project. Typically, Sarfati's American series began with intense research and preparation before any pictures were made; however this fluid and substantial body of work was made over thecourse of only two journeys to America. It is an example of one of those uncanny experiences for photographers, impossible to fully predict, simulate, or repeat (with anycertainty): the photographs, Sarfati says, just ‘happened.' She did not overtly orchestrate or attempt to define her subjects, but was carried by her own notion that, in the process ofcreating, she was exploring and understanding them. While her presence inevitably acted upon these young people, she also created the psychological space for them, in turn, to actupon her. This perhaps accounts for Sarfati's success in representing these American youths as – individually and universally – the carriers of states of mind that centre on wilfulself-determination—states of mind that are by no means exclusive to her chosen subjects. Throughout her work, Sarfati manages to create a loose and layered visualization thatallows us, the viewers, to consider the complexities of any place or time, and one that triggers emotions and thoughts that move beyond the ostensible subjects of herphotographs. The exhibition is curated by Clare Grafik. © Lise Sarfati

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