tv shots - Le Passage du Désir

Press release
TV SHOTS
installation by
Harry Gruyaert
at the Passage du Désir
© Harry Gruyaert / Magnum Photos
OPENING HOURS
PRIVATE VIEWING
PLACE
Exhibition open from 3 to 30 November 2008, every day except Tuesday from 11am to 7pm,
admission free
4 November, from 7pm to 11pm
Passage du Désir, 85-87, rue du Fbg Saint-Martin 75010 Paris, metro: Château d’Eau / Gare de l’Est.
Exhibition organised with the support of Orange, Canon and BETC in collaboration with Magnum Photos, as part of the Mois de la
Photo in Paris, November 2008.
www.passageduDésir.com
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Introduction
By Quentin Bajac
Head of the Cabinet de la Photographie of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou
Over a few months in London in 1972, Harry Gruyaert started to take colour photographs of the screen of his
malfunctioning television set. An apparently trivial gesture, but one rich in meaning which fitted into two movements: the
artistic and playful American Pop Art movement of the previous decade, from Nam June Paik to Andy Warhol with their
fascination for the television as object and for its images; and the current in photography of the same period, from Lee
Friedlander to Robert Frank, which viewed the television as an emblem of consumer society and of the modern world’s
alienation.
By the introduction of strident colours as well as by his voluntary and exclusive focus on the screen, Harry Gruyaert
offered his epoch a very singular way of looking at itself. Caught by his lens, the television became a hallucinatory or
hypnotic machine, like a new Gorgon mesmerizing the modern viewer - a sensation which is reinforced today through the
projection and addition of sound in the new installation set up in the Passage du Désir during the Mois de la Photo.
But the approach of Harry Gruyaert also seems to be calling into question the vocabulary and habits of photojournalism.
His instantaneous capturing of the continuous flux of images on the screen proposed an offbeat version: a somewhat
distanced armchair journalism attesting, half-fascinated and half-horrified, to our inability to bring order into the world and
its representations.
“I was living in London in the early 70s. There was a television set that didn’t work properly in the flat I
was staying in; when you moved the indoor aerial and kept fiddling with the switches it was possible to
obtain fascinating colours.
At the time, of course, the video recorder didn’t exist, not to mention the freeze frame or the possibility
of winding backwards. So I was in live contact with what was showing, holding my camera and
sometimes moving very close to the screen to frame it differently. I ended up by finding myself in a
situation very close to that of street photography, in which, I believe, a good image is a question of
controlling chance, a sort of small miracle.”
-------- Harry Gruyaert
www.passageduDésir.com
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The installation
IMAGES: HARRY GRUYAERT
SOUND DESIGN: LOUIS DANDREL
STAGING DESIGN: OLIVIER KOECHLIN
The “TV Shots” series brings together photographs of television screens taken during the Olympic Games in Munich,
images from sports events, televised series, news broadcasts, films, commercials, dog shows, etc. A kind of photographic
zapping, a random sampling of our televisual memory, a hodge-podge of frozen electronic flux whose doctored colours,
obtained by moving the indoor aerial around, come as a real shock.
This material which is light, deformed, broken up and redirected by electronic manipulation, then captured from a flux,
frozen by the instantaneous chemistry of the argentic film, also contains time. The time of capturing the image, from a
period when the act of creation was still most often immediate. Today, putting this material and this time in space and in
movement raises new issues with the arrival of the pixel and the digital process.
Staging design
The installation in the Passage du Désir will consist of 4 screens on which will be projected about 220 photographs taken
from the “TV Shots” series and a quadraphonic sound system. The spectator will be immersed inside a cathode box
where the combination of images and sounds will put him under great ‘sensorial pressure’ and where it will be possible to
undergo an experience that is both physical and aesthetic. This installation is based on the idea of an image that we
cannot escape from, multiplied and projected on the four sides of a closed interior space. We thus leave the face-on
encounter with the hypnotic televisual source to enter a visual and acoustic choreography of this space.
Our approach to the installation was initially focussed on the rhythmic reading of the images, formalised by the
quadriptych framing, but also disrupted by the trace of the initial experimental gesture that is given a new expression via a
reworking of the digital colour.
Sound design
The projection of “TV Shots” on 4 screens required a special organisation of the soundtrack. The work of Harry Gruyaert
on colour and the abstract shapes that it generates is transposed into instrumental and electroacoustic timbres. This
material and the movement of the sounds, their speed and their dynamics construct the acoustic space around the
images.
The images from television programmes shown in “TV Shots” offer an extremely rich acoustic material. The random use
of synchronous citations culled from television archives will add an animated and violent dimension to the images.
www.passageduDésir.com
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Biographies
Harry Gruyaert
A Belgian photographer living in France, member of Magnum Photos, Harry Gruyaert analyses the issues of colour and its
role in the construction of the image. In 2000, he published Made in Belgium (Delpire), followed in 2003 by the very wellreceived Rivages (Textuel, reprinted in 2008), a series on seasides around the world. Photopoche (Actes Sud) and TV
Shots (Steidl) appeared respectively in 2006 and 2007. The prints of “TV Shots” were exhibited in 1974 at the Delpire
gallery and in 2007 at Phillips de Pury & Co. in New York.
Louis Dandrel
Louis Dandrel is a composer who has always worked on the encounter of music with architecture, the fine arts and
landscapes, and he has often produced works dedicated to public spaces: acoustic gardens in Hong Kong, in Osaka, at
Mont-Saint-Michel in France, at La Villette in Paris, etc. He has also composed music for numerous events, including Le
Chant des etoiles for New Year’s Eve in 2000 on the Champs-Elysées, the ballet Caligula at the Opéra de Paris in 2005,
staged again in 2008, Trésors engloutis du Nil, an exhibition presented in Berlin and Paris in 2007 and Rivages, for an
exhibition of photos by Harry Gruyaert in Paris in 2008.
Olivier Koechlin
In the 1980s, he was a musician and researcher at IRCAM and then with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales of INA,
where he also designed tools for analysing television. A multimedia author, in 2002 he directed the Maâllem Experience
project, combining traditional music and an interactive audio-videographic immersion experience (concerts in the Grande
Halle of La Villette, installation in the Centre Pompidou). Since 2002, he has produced each year the photographic
projections of the Rencontres d’Arles. In 2005 he worked with Martine Franck for the Eurovisions exhibition (Centre
Pompidou), in 2007 with Harry Gruyaert for L'image d'après at the Cinémathèque française, and with Dominique Besson
for the Paroles Trouvées installation (Bains numériques d'Enghien). http://perso.wanadoo.fr/olivier.koechlin/bio/
www.passageduDésir.com
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Organisers
The Passage du Désir
Founded in 2003, the Passage du Désir takes its name from the narrow paved side street beside the building. Its large
exhibition room covers 700 square metres and forms a lively, raw and unfinished setting where exhibitors can adapt its
spaces to their purposes. The Passage du Désir is a centre that hosts cultural cross-overs and meeting-points which
move away from the cloistered world of the “classic” artistic disciplines and encourage the blending of forms and
expressions. This programming freedom is ensured thanks to the centre’s non-profit management by an association, the
Association du Passage du Désir.
Among the numerous events that have taken place in the Passage du Désir since its official opening, the public was
offered: Americaland, photos by Alex S. MacLean; Buzzworld, work by the Dutch video artist and photographer Rineke
Dijkstra (as part of the Festival d’Automne in Paris); Archive – endangered waters, a multimedia installation by the
Icelandic artist Ruri; Joana Vasconcelos, an exhibition of this Portuguese artist’s work; Things As They Are, a
retrospective by World Press Photo (as part of the Mois de la Photo in Paris), and in 2007, Retour sur les Lieux: la
spoliation des Juifs à Paris.
Curator of the exhibitions: Catherine Mathis, [email protected]
www.passagedudesir.com
Magnum Photos
Magnum Photos was founded in 1947 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger and David Seymour,
photographers convinced of the power of the photographic medium to document the world’s upheavals and raise
awareness. By setting up Magnum, they gave themselves complete independence, an indispensable condition for their
commitment. The choice and length of their reportages, the selection of photographs, ownership of negative, control of
copyright and distribution: thus establishing the photographer’s status as author. Attracted by this energy and sharing the
same ethical stance, other photographers joined them, giving birth to one of the world’s most original and prestigious
creative cooperatives.
Magnum Photos now brings together 60 photographers, all with equal shares in the cooperative, and completely in control
of their individual and collective destiny. They bring back pictures from all the outstanding episodes of our times, from
conflicts to revolutions, covering current news stories and producing in-depth visual reports. Their images become icons
that are widely reproduced in the international press, fragments of our collective memory. Magnum Photos celebrated its
61st anniversary in 2008 and continues to organise each year nearly 200 exhibitions and events around the world.
www.magnumphotos.com
www.passageduDésir.com
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Partners
Orange, a major player in the diffusion of content, was a natural choice as partner for this exhibition which proposes a
total and timeless immersion in the heart of the televised image. he multimedia installation is built around photographs of
television screens, frozen images plucked from the electronic flux, and the original photographs have been reworked on
using today’s digital technologies. The projected images are accompanied by dynamic sounds collected from television
archives to provide viewers with a unique sensorial and aesthetic experience.
Orange has been involved for many years on projects in digital creation, either via its Orange Labs (R&D centres), or by
promoting or broadcasting works over its media (television, Internet, mobiles). In proposing different uses of TV, the
objective of Orange is to invent and develop services that are innovative and user-friendly in order to offer its clients the
best programmes when they want them, wherever they are and on the screen of their choice (television, mobile,
computer).
A pioneer in TV and VOD (video on demand) on fixed and mobile broadband in Europe, Orange is the world leader with
nearly 1.4 million subscribers to TV on ADSL at the end of June 2008.
For more information: www.orange.com
The world leader in photography, Canon constantly demonstrates its talent for innovation in the service of photographers
and images through its products. But Canon also believes that its position requires it to contribute actively to the
promotion of photographic creativity, which is why it decided to be the technical partner of the multimedia installation “TV
Shots”, realised with Canon XEED SX7 projectors. Thanks to the revolutionary LCOS technology and improved optical
systems, the XEED range now represents the must in high-quality projection.
Canon is proud to support the exhibition of Harry Gruyaert, a talented photographer, whose “TV Shots” series, an original
form of photographic ‘zapping’, captivates us with its exhilarating and fascinating use of colour.
For more information: www.canon-europe.com/cpn
BETC, the leading French advertising agency, was voted the Most Creative Agency eleven times in thirteen years - from
1994 to 2007 - and Best Agency in Europe. A place for encounters, exchanges of views and collaboration for international
directors, photographers and musicians, BETC has always been open to the talents and imaginative discoveries of artists
and creative people. Each campaign is a fertile and inspiring encounter between these talents and outstanding brands
such as Evian, Air France, Canal+, Peugeot, Lacoste, Petit Bateau, Aigle, etc. for which the BETC agency has built up
unique and powerful territories with a resolutely modern character.
In November 2000, BETC moved to the 10th arrondissement in Paris. Rémi Babinet, the agency’s founder, turned to the
architect Frédéric Jung and a group of European designers for the rehabilitation of these premises. The agency is located
in the Passage du Désir, an old paved side street linking the Rue du Faubourg Saint Martin to the Boulevard de
Strasbourg. Inside the building, the ground floor also looks out on these two main streets and offers a vast area divided up
by concrete pillars and with an annexe area surmounted by a glass mosaic dome. Since 2003, BETC has opened these
areas to the Association du Passage du Désir for the organisation of artistic events of all kinds. At the end of 2008, the
book BETC Paris will be published by the Dutch house BIS Publisher.
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Press information:
Publication:
The book of TV Shots, with an introduction by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, is available in all
good bookshops, including ARTAZART (www.artazart.com) which will be present at the
private viewing to sell the book.
TV Shots, Steidl, 2007
ISBN: 978-3-86521-375-4, 152 pages, 105 colour plates
40 euros
Copyright-free images:
The 6 images below are available copyright-free for any article covering the exhibition “TV Shots” by Harry Gruyaert, at the Passage
du Désir. Of these 6 photographs, only 2 can be published copyright-free at the same time in the same edition of any publication,
even free ones (except for a special internal publication and a guide to the exhibition). These photographs must be used only for the
promotion of this exhibition, and during six months dating from the reception of the high-resolution files. For any other use, or for the
use of other photographs, please contact directly the press office of Magnum Photos Paris: 01.53.42.50.00, Edith Misset:
[email protected] or Sophie Marcilhacy: [email protected]
Photographic credits:
© Harry Gruyaert / Magnum Photos
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Press contact:
Miranda Salt
[email protected]
www.passageduDésir.com
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