The Pompidou Metz Center offers “a great walk” through the history of photography

The exhibition “Seeing time in colors or the challenges of photography” traces 150 years of the history of photography with more than 250 photographs. A unique exhibition to see in Metz until November 18, 2024.

The Pompidou Center Metz (Moselle) presents until November 18, 2024 its brand new exhibition called See the weather in colors. This tour presents the works of around fifty artists from the beginnings of photography to the 20th century.

From the very first photographs to the invasion of color, including the first images of the Moon, the exhibition offers a journey unprecedented of the great technical challenges that have marked the history of the 8th art. “It’s a dream to have Chiara Parisi [la directrice du Centre Pompidou-Metz] who comes to see you to offer to create a photo exhibition on 2000 m2″, says the exhibition curator Sam Stourdzé, a photography specialist.

More than 250 works, loaned by around forty institutions, and all original, trace the history of photography in a “great aesthetic walk”, according to Sam Stourdzé. It includes the first photographs from the 1850s to works from 2024. The challenge seemed daunting, he says. “It would have been better seen as a book than as an exhibition, as it is difficult to bring together so many masterpieces.”

The aim, for the exhibition curator, was not to create a “technical rereading of photography” across decades and even centuries, but rather “see how technical advances have allowed photographers to conquer aesthetics.” “Sam Stourdzé’s great strength is to talk about the moving image but also about the immobility of the image”, greets Chiara Parisi, evoking an exhibition “full of poetry, imagination”.

The notion of challenge or conquest is present throughout the exhibition. The exhibition, called Seeing time in colors, the challenges of photographytakes place in three stages: the conquest of sight, the conquest of time, then that of color. “It is an exhibition that tells the story of the making of the gaze, seeing the world around us and how photography accompanied the great discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries”, explains Sophie Bernal, researcher for the exhibition.

The need to reproduce reality is not recent, as shown at the beginning of the tour by a 300-year-old copy of the Mona Lisa. As for photography, in its early days, it remained the daughter of painting: the photographer Gustave Le Gray reproduced in black and white the masterpieces of the painters of his time. Then came the conquests of the infinitely small, with photos taken under a microscope or of shrimp legs, and of the infinitely large. “When going to the Moon or to the top of mountains like Mont Blanc or Everest, the photo had to exist, there had to be proof.”recalls Sam Stourdzé. The Paris Observatory lent the Metz museum the very first photographs of the Moon, taken with a telescope by the Henry brothers in the 1890s.

The other challenge “major” was from “fix the time”with this “conquest of the moment” which made it possible to break down movement, such as the large chronophotographic panels of Etienne-Jules Marey (1882) or these photos by Eadweard Muybridge who managed in 1878 to capture the gait of a galloping horse using twelve cameras juxtaposed against each other. He thus demonstrated that the horse never has all four shoes in the air.

Much later, it was the American scientist Harold Edgerton who developed, from the 1930s onwards, strobe devices and triggers a small revolution. “It revolutionizes it because we can see what is absolutely invisible. A drop of milk that spurts out, a pistol bullet that is stopped dead in its tracks and goes through an apple, a banana or a playing card. These are scientific feats that will allow us to better understand the world,” explains Sam Stourdzé.

After a long journey in black and white, the visitor is invited to enter the color with Louis Ducos du Hauron. In 1877, he was the first to take a color photo. The Archives of the planet by Albert Kahn and the clichés “burlesque, eccentric and feminist aesthetic qualities” by Yevonde Middleton (1930s), a pioneer of colour photography in England. We also meet other personalities in a less formal context, such as the series of photos of Philippe Halsman in 1959 showing Marilyn Monroe in mid-jump.

“Thirty or forty years ago, there was still a big debate about whether photography could be considered a work of art or a document,” Sam Stourdzé recalls. Now the question is settled. Especially since the “great strength of the photo”, for him, is that she now represents “our visual culture”.

If the exhibition begins with photographic reproductions of paintings, it ends conversely with paintings made on the basis of photographs by Gerhard Richter from the beginning of the 1960s. As for the digital revolution, Sam Stourdzé believes that it is “one more conquest”not addressed in the exhibition because it is “perhaps still a little early to see aesthetic advances in it.”

The exhibition “Seeing time in colors”, at the Pompidou Metz center until November 18, 2024.
Open every day except Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Prices from €7 to €14. Free for under 26s.