L E M U S É E D E L A P H O T O G R A P H I E
EXHIBITIONS FROM 28.9.2019 UNTIL 19.1.2020
Centre d’art contemporain de la Fédération
Wallonie-Bruxelles

11, av. Paul Pastur (GPS : Place des Essarts) B-6032 Charleroi (Mont-sur-Marchienne)
T +32 (0)71 43.58.10 F +32 (0)71 36.46.45
mpc.info@museephoto.be
The museum is open from Tuesday to Sunday from 10 to 18.
Closed on December 25, 2019 and Januari 1, 2020.

La photographie sociale et documentaire en France et en Belgique 1928-1936

Organised on the basis of the Pompidou Centre’s photography collections, this exhibition sheds a new light on social and documentary photography, emerging in Europe, particularly in France and in Belgium, in the early thirties. The Popular Front and the icons of the Spanish Civil War still broadly summarise today the idea of commitment during the inter-war years to the detriment of this essential period whose iconographic
repertory represents a real laboratory for photography seen from a socially-committed perspective.
Through a selection of almost 100 works and forty or so documents, the Exhibition is built around thematic axes (antimilitarism, the struggle against the colonies, etc.) and formal series, where the greatest names of modern photography are found side by side (Willy Ronis, Eli Lotar, Nora Dumas, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Germaine Krull, Gisèle Freund, Willy Kessels, Lisette Model, etc.).
Photography as a weapon of class struggle questions the shift from a picturesque iconography of poverty, epitomised by the Paris of Eugène Atget (1857-1927) to social awareness of the picture of destitution portrayed by the capital at the beginning of the thirties. Specific techniques, such as photomontage, are given particular prominence, with the architect and militant Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) who, at that time, was able to grasp the “explosive” potential of photographic montage. Lastly, recurring iconographic subjects, from the image of the worker to representations ofthe collective struggle, not to mention the strategies of the illustrated left-wing press
(Regards, Vu, Vie ouvrière en Belgique) make it possible to fill the gaps in the picture of social photography during the inter-war years, with the help of recent discoveries.
Photographie, arme de classe, (photography as a weapon of class struggle) are the words with which the journalist Henri Tracol (1909-1997) begins his manifesto on unifying the photography section of the association of revolutionary writers and artists (A.E.A.R.).
The Association was founded in Paris in 1932, against a background of growing political, economic and social upheaval. In Belgium, Henri Storck, at the request of Louis Aragon, was the one who would form the revolutionary cultural association (A.R.C.).

SANDRINE LOPEZ
ARKHÊ

Where is the source of Sandrine Lopez’s photographs to be found? What is the starting point and the focal point? A fascination for a silhouette, a posture, a face? A desire to get as close as she possibly can, to grasp its very essence?

In thirty or so photographs, Arkhê presents the result of pursuits and encounters that were obsessive, thrilling and tense but were all fascinating. They would all lead to a portrait, an image, with night as their common denominator.
Arkhê, a both sublime and terrifying confrontation with the body, the persistence of that look already described by Christophe Van Rossom in the text accompanying the images of Moshé, her previous work: “a blinking look shifting between curiosity and terror, into the depths of a being”.

Sandrine Lopez is a French photographer and video maker, born in 1982, who lives and works in Brussels. After a Master’s degree in Sociology in Bordeaux, she devoted herself to photography and left to study at the École Supérieure des Arts de l’image “Le 75” in Brussels.

She graduated in June 2011, and continued an exploration taking various forms and crossing through spaces within which the human figure remains central. Between photography, video and writing, she regularly shares the progress of her work during conferences given in the context of the various jobs she has held since 2012. She is currently completing the making of a documentary film (at the post-production phase) entitled “Demain c’était Dimanche”, (Tomorrow was Sunday) in which she paints the portrait of a man with no memory with whom she shared everyday life.
Outside the school walls, she organises workshops “The House” with the photographer Sébastien Van Malleghem and co-founded the AHHA platform in cooperation with the photographer Pierre Liebaert.

PHILIPPE GRATON
ZAD

The ZAD* of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, to the north of Nantes (France), has been figuring prominently in the news for ten years.

Arising from opposition to the building of an airport in a nature conservation area, it became a place for experimentation for alternative society, organic farming, non-commodified relations and other social experimentation.

This continued after the victory of the struggle and the abandonment of the airport project by the French Government, early 2018. From 2014 to 2019, Philippe Graton experienced the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes from the inside, succeeding in being accepted by the militants, photographing that world and that society’s everyday life with medium-format film. This long-term commitment gives us an outstanding photographic work, a unique and historical restitution of this marginal experience.

The interest of this experience and the societal choices it raises have never been so relevant today.

The exhibition presents sixty or so unpublished pictures. The book that accompanies the exhibition reveals, in addition to the photographs, the author’s field notes, to be followed like an adventure.

A unique testimony, different from everything that people may have seen or heard about the ZAD. * ZAD is the French administrative acronym for a “zone d’aménagement différé” (future development zone) intended for a major construction project. The opponents to the project misappropriate the term and call it “zone à défendre” (zone to be defended).érêt et les choix de société qu’elle soulève n’ont jamais été aussi actuels.

As a Frenchman born in Brussels in 1961, Philippe Graton grew up among picture
storytellers: René Goscinny, Albert Uderzo, Jean-Michel Charlier or even his father
Jean Graton, giants of the comic book. No wonder that his involvement in photography,
from the early age of thirteen, has always been connected with writing. A life of
tales in texts and pictures took him from racetracks to film sets by way of Vietnam,
Cambodia or the war in Bosnia which he photographed for the Sygma agency.