A clean shot. In Photo of Me Shooting Myself in a Photograph, a series made in the late 1990s, Swiss photographer Rudolf Steiner carried out an ironic experiment. If in Guns (Arms) he photographed the inside of a rifle with the help of an endoscope, here it was he himself who wielded a compressed air shotgun with which he fired directly at a slide that he had placed in the bottom of a dark box The hole Through which the bullet passed, it let in the light, making it possible for the image to be produced, while locating the exact point of the shooter's eye on it.
Of course, it is a very unconventional method of taking a self-portrait, but Steiner is not a loose verse within the field of experimental photography, as can be seen in Expanded Visions , the new CaixaForum exhibition that until August 27 brings together 172 photographs from the Center Pompidou in Paris, from the surrealists to the present. “They are creators from very diverse fields and disciplines, art, science, graphic design, architecture or poetry, who share an almost childlike spirit of play and use the photographic medium with enormous freedom, as if they were authentic inventors. ”, says the curator Julie Jones.
The exhibition, which has already been presented in Madrid and will later travel to Seville and Valencia, brings together classics such as Man Ray, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, Brancusi, Brassaï and William Klein together with contemporary artists, such as the Icelander Olafur Eliasson, who equipped with light bulbs de leed breakdances in a dark room while a camera captures her movements. Or the Englishman Steven Pippin, who walked naked through a laundry and his movements were captured by a lens placed in the tub of a washing machine that instead of detergent was loaded with developing products.
And the French-American Jeff Guess devised a large installation seven meters in diameter, which here occupies the center of the exhibition, whose images were taken with the negative inside his mouth, like a camera obscura, capturing the different objects household that he was taking with his hand. (One of Guess's most famous photographs is the official portrait of his own wedding in 1993: instead of going to a professional photographer's studio, he and his new wife, dressed in wedding attire, got into a car and deliberately drove on a highway speeding so that a speed camera would take care of their bridal portrait).
The photographs of the Pompidou, which has one of the most important collections in the world and to which a photograph by Emili Godes from the MNAC has been added here, do not follow a chronological narrative but are distributed around six thematic areas (Light, Movement, Alterations , Recreating Worlds , Vision to the Test and Anatomies ) in which the artists establish rich dialogues without rules, where creation arises in many cases from errors, coincidences, deconstructions or drifts, always so welcome. Man Ray himself explained having discovered the photogram procedure (a photograph obtained by interposing the object between the sensitive paper and the light source) one day when he accidentally turned on the light in the workshop. From there arises a new way of understanding photography that until today has not stopped extending its limits.
“Photography is an incomprehensible medium from its origins,” reflects Jones. “In the 19th century, people were terrified when they saw those very real images and in the 20th century progress has been made until reaching its current democratization. I am not afraid of the revolution and the development that the arrival of AI is going to mean. What would scare me is things not moving. That is scary."
