May 30 - August 1, 2015
Polka Galerie

Marc Riboud

The One For The other

Alaska, 1958

 

Polka Gallery is honored to present this latest exhibit of Marc Riboud’s work, produced in collaboration with Michel Frizot, CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scienti que – National Center for Scienti c Researches) Emeritus Research Director.

« The One For The Other » questions the photographers true intentions, how the viewer – the observer - feels while looking at the work and the relevance of certain details.
« If the photographer does not release the shutter at the relevant moment, it all disappears instantly. So it is the photographer’s duty to decide, without further ado, what can make sense at the end of the creative process, when the image is  xed for good.”
However, “It is not suf cient to be an informed passerby, one has to externalizes his own astonishment. One can not be without the other”

Michel Frizot
(Extract from the foreword to Marc Riboud ‘s « L’instinct de l’instant » The Instinct of the Moment – published by Paris Musée )


Since 1953, Marc Riboud has been traveling from country to country, photographing people, landscapes, life.
« My photography practice is most often a solitary type of work - a silent craft, undertaken with endless walks, wandering and waiting around for hours. I also like to capture details, little things taken from daily life. I am neither a philosopher nor a sociologist. I merely look at the surface of things.”
Everywhere he looks, the photographer sees round  gures, lines or curves.

His mentor Henri Cartier-Bresson once wrote, in one of his many letters to Marc Riboud : “How luck you are to be born a geomatics engineer, there are so few of them...”. From his very  rst photographs, Marc Riboud measures. The Painter by the Eiffel Tower – his  first publication – remains, to this day, one of his most iconic images and one of his best studies.
His secret ? “In order to see clearly, one has to be quick and precise. It’s a daily exercise, a re ex one has to practice day after day. Don’t they say “Fit as a Fiddle” ? (…. )

« The One For The Other » takes us along a photographic escape through a body of work that we may think we already know. Throughout a selection of 47 rarely shown prints, photographic historian Michel Frizot sheds light on the strong coherence linking Riboud’s work, form and personality as a photographer.

The gallery would like to thank Catherine Riboud and Michel Frizot for their precious collaboration.