Friday, 24 September 2010
Saturday, 18 September 2010
Pictures at an exhibition
Natalie Gallard de Zaleu
The Temoin family at the house that is now the Bibliotheque where the exhibition is held
Some of the glass plate negatives
Matt White left, Elisabeth Doussett, Director of the Bibliotheque centre, and Philippe Gitton Minister of Culture and History, right
Exhibition Launch in Bourges
Patrick Gallard de Zaleu, descendant of the Témoins
, 3rd from left, Elisabeth Doussett Director of Bibliotheque de Bourges 2nd from left, Matt & Robbie White 5th&6th from left, Natalie Gallard de Zaleu at right, with Gallard de Zaleu cousins at left and centre at the launch on Friday 17th September
, 3rd from left, Elisabeth Doussett Director of Bibliotheque de Bourges 2nd from left, Matt & Robbie White 5th&6th from left, Natalie Gallard de Zaleu at right, with Gallard de Zaleu cousins at left and centre at the launch on Friday 17th September
Friday, 17 September 2010
Exhibition of century-old photographs in Bourges
From Discovery to Exhibition:
The story of the Témoin photographs
While visiting a brocante at Lurcy-Levis in 2007, I saw at a stand a box containing small boxes of Lumiere glass negatives. I bought two of them. The following year I visited the same brocante and bought all the rest of them, some 170 glass-plate negatives. As a photographer these pictures were of great interest to me. I found that some were marked 1909. I also found out that some were taken in the city of Bourges. A great number of the pictures featured a family who were obviously wealthy, since the photographs featured their travels in Italy, Spain, and France. Investigating the pictures revealed more details. With the help of the Musee du Berry, in particular Beatrice de Chancel-Bardelot, I found that many pictures featured a festival in Bourges that looked like ‘Les fetes de l’argentier’ that took place in 1910. Beatrice, on seeing some of the pictures went out on her bicycle with her husband and emailed me back the same views taken with her digital camera, confirming the locations of four street scenes in Bourges.
My initial interest was that they were Lumiere plates, as these set the standards for all modern photography, with their speed and high resolution.
The pictures I thought most important featured a gentleman with a long white beard, who was pictured painting the church at Primelles. I forwarded these pictures to the Tate Gallery, The Courtauld Institute, and The National Gallery in London. Some curators thought the artist was Monet, while others thought it was Degas. But it is not either of those artists. Who it is, is still a mystery.
Beatrice de Chancel-Bardelot noted that an interior and exterior shot of a balcony were the present day Bibliotheque in Place Quatre Piliers. This led to the possibility that the family was the Témoins, who left hotel Témoin to the city of Bourges as a bibliotheque. Beatrice had a picture of Daniel Témoin, an eminent surgeon. He looked similar to the gentleman in my pictures, but then many gentlemen of the period looked similar. Documentary proof came from a photograph showing a 1906 Renault 6cv. An email to the Archives Departementales proved that the owner of the motor-car, whose number plate was shown in the picture, was Daniel Témoin of 4, Place Quatre Piliers.
Then in 2009 I met with Elisabeth Doussett of the Bibliotheque Municipale in Bourges, and found myself sitting in the room featured in one of the pictures. Elisabeth took my wife Robbie and me on a lovely tour of the library to all the rooms the public doesn’t see, including Dr Daniel Témoin’s consulting room, the kitchen, and dining room. Elisabeth’s office is the living room featured in the pictures, with Témoin, daughter and grand-daughters.
Elisabeth met with a descendant of the Témoins, M. Patrick Gallard de Zaleu, whose grandfather married one of the Témoin daughters. Patrick was able to identify many of the people and locations featured in the pictures.
Elisabeth also discovered the name of the family chateau, on the Cher, and that the Témoins owned a villa in Nice on the Cote D’Azur. A further and larger collection of glass-plate negatives, is held by the Van Iperen-Hoevens, also featuring the lives and travels of the family Daniel Témoin.
Having agreed that an exposition must be held of these photographs, Elisabeth and I made plans to display the collection.
First I had to make sure the negatives were in good condition, as we had decided to show only ‘real’ photographic prints, rather than digitally scanned images. This meant the negatives had to be cleaned, as most were dusty. Some had surface damage, while one or two were cracked, but not broken. I made some tests with a poor quality, double exposed negative, to clean it of dust. I ran the negative under cold running water, and used my clean finger to gently clear the dust from the surface. I kept immersion time down to less than 30 seconds, and dried the plates in sunshine on a windowsill. Comparison before and after this process showed a cleaner image with no added damage. I repeated this process with all 170 negatives, and all of them survived the cleaning.
As Northampton College has a large photographic facility, I was able to use a large, wall-mounted De Vere enlarger, with a 5x4 negative carrier, which I had to adapt to take the smaller negative size of the glass plates. The pictures were by no means easy to print, as some areas of the image had to be differentially printed, sometimes to twice the length of time of the rest of the image. Many pictures needed an exposure time of 20 minutes or more. The sheer size of them was also a slight problem, but I was able to complete the printing with no mishaps. It was a pleasure to see the images appear. Large photographs have a way of drawing you in to the picture, and you can see details that are invisible in smaller images.
There is a possibility that the photographer of these historic pictures is in the photograph in this exposition, showing a man featured with a camera on a tripod. He is likely to be the husband of one of Daniel Témoin’s daughters. But the collection, both mine and those held in the Van Iperen-Hoevens collection, feature images taken when the daughters were merely children, long before their marriages. So as yet this primary question remains essentially unanswered.
When I look at the family in these photographs, I feel I am a benign voyeur into their private lives. I also wonder about the journey these glass negatives made, from the original photographer or photographers, through two world wars, becoming separated from the Témoin family, and eventually being offered for sale at a brocante at Lurcy-Levis.
I am so glad the pictures found me, and that I did something about discovering their history.
Matt White
September 2010
Photographs of the 'vernissage' to follow
Friday, 3 September 2010
Further tribute to Corinne Day from the Telegraph website
Corinne Day: 'Be proud of holes in your jumper’
Lucy Davies celebrates the work of photographer Corinne Day, who has died at the age of 48
By Lucy Davies Published: 6:09PM BST 02 Sep 2010
Kate Moss (detail), published in British Vogue, June 1993 Photo: CORINNE DAY
Twenty years ago, the photographer Corinne Day, who has died of a brain tumour at the age of 48, walked into Storm model agency and laid eyes on a 16-year-old Kate Moss. “I looked at her,” she later recalled, “and thought, 'She’s like me.’ She was cheeky, and I really liked that. That’s how it all began. We helped each other out.”
What began was more far-reaching than either of them could have foreseen. Kate Moss was chalk to the Eighties cheese in fashion model terms. Her peculiar blend of gangly, gap-toothed elegance lent her a vulnerability that appealed to a generation tired of high-octane gloss.
Day took Moss to Camber Sands, East Sussex, and photographed her running around the beach wearing nothing but a feathered headdress and a pair of Birkenstocks. Moss is breathless, laughing, and iced with perspiration. The photographs, published in style bible The Face captured the zeitgeist with such acuity that they changed everything.
“Fashion photography had always been about fantasy,” Day said. “I wanted to take it in the opposite direction… The best thing I did for fashion was bringing it down to earth, bringing a documentary quality to it. I wanted to put in that feeling of youth culture. After my pictures came out, the sale of Birkenstock sandals skyrocketed!”
Day had unwittingly opened the door on a new aesthetic that had been simmering at lower levels. As the Eighties drew to a close, a handful of editors and art directors had thrown caution to the wind and commissioned photographers such as Robert Frank, who had produced a series of black-and-white images in an unposed, “street” style for an Alberto Aspesi catalogue, and Saul Leiter, who was given free reign on a Comme des Garçons campaign, his images of grubby, discarded shoes and clothing half-submerged in puddles covered in grit utterly out of kilter with the prevailing style.
At the arty end of photography and film, a gritty, diaristic style had begun insinuating its way into the mainstream. Day took the work she saw in Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency and Larry Clark’s Tulsa and made the leap from art to commerce. Encouraged by the healthy response to the Camber Sands story, she began photographing unscrubbed models in bleak surroundings.
Her images tuned into a grey, post-Thatcherite Britain and ushered in a new type of beauty that was dubbed “dirty realism”. In discarding the iconically handsome, goddess body, she had turned her back on 60 years of fashion photography. Her wan, pallid subjects looked starving and mildly under the influence. The images came to stand for the Nineties as much as the film Trainspotting, and were smiliarly charged with promoting “heroin chic”.
Her career as fashion photographer ended much as it had begun – with her by now close friend Kate Moss. Commissioned to photograph an underwear feature for Vogue, she took Moss to a grubby flat and immortalised her in sagging knickers against a backdrop of sloppily strung fairy lights. The pictures published several months later, prompted a tidal wave of vitriol.
The then editor of Cosmopolitan, Marcelle D’Argy Smith, branded them “hideous and tragic. I believe they can only appeal to the paedophile market.” Day’s three-year run “poking fun at fashion” was over. “Half-way through the shoot,” she said, “I realised that it wasn’t fun for [Kate] any more, and that she was no longer my best friend but had become a 'model’. She hadn’t realised how beautiful she was, and when she did, I found I didn’t think her beautiful any more.”
Looking at the controversial photograph today, it seems remarkably conventional. The wheel of fashion has turned again and we’ve moved into a posed, staged world that harks back to a Sixties aesthetic of glamour and control.
But Day’s work fired the imagination of a whole generation of photographers. Juergen Teller, Craig McDean, David Sims and Glen Luchford are just some who took her underground look and fed it to the fashion monthlies. Later, Day vanished into documentary and autobiographical photography, but her work ignited a revolution in our ideas of what was beautiful and desirable.
“It is all about freedom, really,” Day said “and being proud of the holes in your jumper.”
“Fashion photography had always been about fantasy,” Day said. “I wanted to take it in the opposite direction… The best thing I did for fashion was bringing it down to earth, bringing a documentary quality to it. I wanted to put in that feeling of youth culture. After my pictures came out, the sale of Birkenstock sandals skyrocketed!”
Day had unwittingly opened the door on a new aesthetic that had been simmering at lower levels. As the Eighties drew to a close, a handful of editors and art directors had thrown caution to the wind and commissioned photographers such as Robert Frank, who had produced a series of black-and-white images in an unposed, “street” style for an Alberto Aspesi catalogue, and Saul Leiter, who was given free reign on a Comme des Garçons campaign, his images of grubby, discarded shoes and clothing half-submerged in puddles covered in grit utterly out of kilter with the prevailing style.
At the arty end of photography and film, a gritty, diaristic style had begun insinuating its way into the mainstream. Day took the work she saw in Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency and Larry Clark’s Tulsa and made the leap from art to commerce. Encouraged by the healthy response to the Camber Sands story, she began photographing unscrubbed models in bleak surroundings.
Her images tuned into a grey, post-Thatcherite Britain and ushered in a new type of beauty that was dubbed “dirty realism”. In discarding the iconically handsome, goddess body, she had turned her back on 60 years of fashion photography. Her wan, pallid subjects looked starving and mildly under the influence. The images came to stand for the Nineties as much as the film Trainspotting, and were smiliarly charged with promoting “heroin chic”.
Her career as fashion photographer ended much as it had begun – with her by now close friend Kate Moss. Commissioned to photograph an underwear feature for Vogue, she took Moss to a grubby flat and immortalised her in sagging knickers against a backdrop of sloppily strung fairy lights. The pictures published several months later, prompted a tidal wave of vitriol.
The then editor of Cosmopolitan, Marcelle D’Argy Smith, branded them “hideous and tragic. I believe they can only appeal to the paedophile market.” Day’s three-year run “poking fun at fashion” was over. “Half-way through the shoot,” she said, “I realised that it wasn’t fun for [Kate] any more, and that she was no longer my best friend but had become a 'model’. She hadn’t realised how beautiful she was, and when she did, I found I didn’t think her beautiful any more.”
Looking at the controversial photograph today, it seems remarkably conventional. The wheel of fashion has turned again and we’ve moved into a posed, staged world that harks back to a Sixties aesthetic of glamour and control.
But Day’s work fired the imagination of a whole generation of photographers. Juergen Teller, Craig McDean, David Sims and Glen Luchford are just some who took her underground look and fed it to the fashion monthlies. Later, Day vanished into documentary and autobiographical photography, but her work ignited a revolution in our ideas of what was beautiful and desirable.
“It is all about freedom, really,” Day said “and being proud of the holes in your jumper.”
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