VALENCIA. Never before have so many photographs been taken as now. With a camera always in our pocket capable of storing thousands of images on our mobile phone, our relationship with photography has changed profoundly in recent years. And it continues to do so, now with its sights set on Artificial Intelligence. However, basic debates are often maintained, even if the years pass, those that have to do with the representation of reality, with the construction of fictions and the ability to create new worlds. In this last section, the one that has to do with the “lyrical capacity” of photography, the exhibition is framed Expanded visions, an exhibition that displays at Caixaforum València a good sample of the Center Pompidou collections through which a story is drawn around experimental photography that goes beyond chronological reading to immerse itself in a journey that intertwines art, sensitivity, science and technology. In short, photography.
“In this exhibition we take advantage of that lyrical capacity of photography, we are going to talk about seeing and looking, about the capacity of photography to portray worlds, to modify them, even to create new worlds and new fictions, and of course to explore limits beyond photography with other disciplines.” These words are signed by the director of CaixaForum València, Alvaro Borraswho presented the exhibition together with the head of content for Art Exhibitions of the ‘la Caixa’ FoundationCarla Tarruellaand its commissioner, Julie Jones. Nearly a hundred works come together in an exhibition that comes to Valencia with a version adapted from its previous tours in cities like Madrid and Barcelona and with some novelty, such as the inclusion of a piece of Josep Renau, Consumer Societyfrom the 1970s, from the collection of the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), and photography Photomontage inspired by the França Station of Gabriel Casasfrom the 1930s, from the collections of the National Art Museum of Catalonia.
Under the umbrella of “experimental photography”, the center seeks to explore the different ways in which, since the beginning of the 20th century, creators have approached and shown interest in the photographic medium, then considered the contemporary tool par excellence. It does so with a common axis, but emphasizing at all times the diversity of views, a plurality that not only has to do with the results, with the pieces on display, but also with the very conception of the work, works created with different motivations, some closer to the artistic fact and others to the technological or scientific fact. It is time, perspective, that has ended up bringing them together in the same space that now generates a dance of signatures among which some stand out such as Man Ray, Brassai either William Klein.
Precisely Man Ray, who systematized the use of the photogram and gave the technique artistic value, is one of the brands that begin the exhibition tour, a first stop that focuses on the investigation of light as a principle of photographic experimentation. Along with him are other names such as László Moholy-Nagywith its abstract and singular proposal, or Maurice Tabard, who immerses himself in the surrealist imagination through the so-called solarizations, a delicate technique that consists of subjecting the negative or photosensitive paper to an intense white light at the time of development. A few steps away we find the breathtaking images created by the French-Canadian photographer and writer Alix Cleo Roubaudpieces that tell us about the fascination with movement, in this case with a series in which the rhythm of breathing itself gives shape to suggestive and sometimes gloomy images.
The movement also, although from a very different point of view, has to do with the work of the American scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Boston, Harold Eugene Edgertonwho manufactured a device capable of decomposing the movement of objects through a system of fleeting light flashes, a work that led him to be one of the protagonists of the first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1937. A question of technique , the exhibition addresses the multiple possibilities of expanding the scope of the human eye through techniques such as the microscope, telescope or infrared, a story that not only talks about art, but also about medicine or architecture, and that adds visions such as images lights of Georges Guilpin and Étienne Léopold Trouvelot or psychedelic forms of Gottfried Jager.
“The historical distance allows us to see these works as milestones of photography,” stressed the curator, who defined the exhibition not so much as a linear story but as a “catalog of ways to experience photography in a constant dialogue between history and the contemporary.” ”. In this sense, the question of reality remains in the background, in an exhibition that emphasizes photography as a way of looking in a unique way at the existing world and, also, as a means to create new scenarios. Pieces such as Nocturne of Brassaia shadow composition of Gerard Ifert or the portrait of the French surrealist photographer and illustrator Roger Parry. Both give shape to an unconventional history of photography that, from today, unfolds at Caixaforum València.
