Wandering


Edouard Boubat,Jacques Henri Lartigue,Marc Riboud, Sabine Weiss

According to the French dictionnary, wandering relates to the fact or the habit of roaming, of being a wanderer, a vagabond. Until recently in France (1994), wandering was an offence aimed at anyone “who has no place of residence nor any means of subsistence and who does not have a regular job”. Indeed, photographs are wanderers, hanging around and meddling in other people’s businesses, setting their heart on everything or even on anything. Besides, is being a photographer really a “profession”? It’s rather a state of mind, a “state of imagination”…

Four wanderers, three men and one woman, have been searching for the wonderful, the fantastic element in every corner of the world or much closer, just next street, on the banks of the Seine river or in a deserted avenue on a winter night. For these artists, “elsewhere and faraway” means everything and nothing altogether, photography is just about life: a glance, a feeling, a gesture, a poetic adventure, an ephemeral moment. Edouard Boubat wondered accurately: “How to find what one does not look after ?” . The search is perpetually the same: an unexpected encounter on a cold winter morning in the Luxembourg gardens, on the banks of the river in Paris or in the far away countries of South-East Asia (Japan or Nepal for instance): “the real subject, it’s slightly oneself, it’s a kind of absolute”. A cheerful and frivolous wanderer, Jacques Henri Lartigue was at his best capturing the fleeting instants of happiness (a jumping dog, a pensive young lady swimming in a quiet sea) and the simple moments of a sophisticated life (a beautiful young woman sitting at the table of a luxurious restaurant on a summer day, a child blowing bubbles). Living in a world where the weather was unfailingly “beautiful”, “very beautiful” or “very very beautiful”, Lartigue provides, in the manner of a delightful dilettante, the snapshots of an enchanted world. Marc Riboud liked to say that he “had seen the world”. A “walker” rather than a traveler, he endlessly searched for the joy of living: a street scene, an unexpected portrait as well as a thousand other shots. He photographed the beauty of the world with “tremendous pleasure”. Sabine Weiss photographs “to retain the ephemeral moment, to fix chance, to keep in image what is going to vanish”. Her portraits forge a humanity praising life in order to freeze it just at the moment it will disappear, in a manner blending tenderness and gravity. “The photograph is tied up to the instant, that fugitive and marvelous moment that the photographer must catch”. The depth of her photographs led her to take part to the iconic exhibition of the Moma of New York, “The Family of Man” in 1955.


Exhibition from November 11, 2017 to February 10, 2018