Qu'est-ce que la photographie ?

In addition to the exhibition What is photography? , presented in the

photography gallery (from March 4 to June 1, 2015, Forum-1), the film

department offers an overview of the contradictory and complementary relations

between photography and moving pictures.

Depicting photography through its caricatural gaze, the cinema has grabbed the

figure of the photographer in order to deride him. Constrained by the

immobility of his photographed subjects and trapped by the frenetic chain of

unfortunate events, the photographer appeared as an intriguing character of the

burlesque register. As this unusual Sheriff photographer unhappy in business

imagined by Mack Sennett and starring by Harry Langdon – the famous slapstick

American actor - in Smile Please (1924), the two American artists Michael Smith

and William Wegman have reactivated through The World of Photography (1986),

the foundations of this tragicomic tradition by magnifying the common ideas

about a practice that they confound into a position. Invited by Carole Ann

Klonarides and Michael Owen, the American artist Cindy Sherman lends also

herself to this role playing in which she embodies once more a series of her

photographed characters. Created in order to subvert the stereotypical media

representations of photography whose the industrial film series Your Life Work:

Photography (1946) illustrates in an absurd manner the common places, MICA-TV:

Cindy Sherman: An Interview (1980) brings a renewed and critical approach of

the photographic experience which appears in constant redefinition.

Roy Del Ruth, Smile Please, 1924, 35mm (DCP), bw, sil, 12’13

Vocational Guidance Films, Inc. Your Life Work series: Photography, 1946, 35mm

(digital file), bw, sound, 10’ (vo)

Carole Ann Klonarides and Michael Owen, MICA-TV : Cindy Sherman : An Interview,

1980.81, video, coul, sound, 10’20 (vo)

Michael Smith and William Wegman, The World of Photography, 1986, video, coul,

sound, 24’35 (vo)

Thanks : Lobster Films (Paris), Electronic Arts Intermix (New York)