Mardi 19 Mai 2015 10:49:13 par Clarisse Treilles dans Expositions

The Walther Collection presents "The Order of Things: Photography from The Walther Collection", a major exhibition exploring how the organization of photographs into systematic sequences or typologies has affected modern visual culture. The Order of Things investigates the production and uses of serial portraiture, conceptual structures, vernacular imagery, and time-based performance in photography from the 1880s to the present, bringing together works by artists from Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America. Curated by Brian Wallis, former Chief Curator at the International Center of Photography in New York, the exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Steidl/The Walther Collection.

Throughout the modern era, photography has been enlisted to classify the world and its people. Driven by a belief in the scientific objectivity of photographic evidence, the logics utilized to classify photographs-in groups and categories or sequences of identically organized images-also shape our visual consciousness. In the twenty-first-century new digital technologies and globalization have radically transformed the applications of photography, making the reconsideration of photographic information systems ever more urgent. "The Order of Things" proposes a political and philosophical basis for understanding recent organizational methods in global photography, examining not only the ambivalent meanings of documentary photography but also the social conditions of the image in contemporary culture. The first survey exhibition to investigate this critical cross-cultural direction in photography, The Order of Things shows the diverse ways that photographers have engaged sequential organizing strategies-or sought to subvert them.

Nobuyoshi Araki, 101 Works for Robert Frank (Private Diary), 1993
Courtesy The Walther Collection and Anton Kern Gallery, New York

The exhibition's approach upends conventional histories of photography, which until recently have focused primarily on the single photograph and the so-called "decisive moment." The Order of Things looks closely at the widespread uses of the multiple images in sequence. Setting early modernist photographers August Sander and Karl Blossfeldt in dialogue with contemporary international photographers such as J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere and Ai Weiwei, the exhibition examines how conceptual structures of photography, serial portraiture, and time-based performance have developed around the globe.

Zanele Muholi, Phila Mbanjwa, Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu Natal, 2012
Zanele Muholi, Dorothy Magome, Mafikeng, North West, from "Faces and Phases"
Courtesy The Walther Collection and Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg