Art Paris

To celebrate the bicentenary of the invention of photography, Galerie Polka revisits the magic of this process with four photographers who, each in their own way, have totally redefined the medium. Three contemporary names: Miho Kajioka, Paul Cupido and Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon. And a master who revolutionized the codes of modern photography in the 50s: William Klein. Through their lenses and hands, photography becomes a material available for other usages (collage, painting, re-use).

Japanese photographer Miho Kajioka, winner of the Prix Nadar in 2019 for her book "So it goes" (The(M) Edition), creates small, irregular, intimate and delicate objects from her images, half-erased by the final bath of tea in which the photographer plunges them at the laboratory stage.

For this new edition of Art Paris, the artist presents an original series combining color and black & white prints, produced in Paris. On the walls, her work resonates with images by photographer Paul Cupido, winner of the Hariban Jury Prize in 2017. This Netherlands-born artist, who says he is constantly in search of the ephemeral, makes his prints on Japanese Kozo paper, giving a painting-like quality to his writing. For the first time at the show, he will be exhibiting a polyptych of 9 prints, which together form a single image in a unique edition. 

As a contrast, young French photographer Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon seeks out the preciousness of the object-image through moments frozen on black & white silver film, then colored with oil paint using her paintbrushes or her own fingertips.

By her side is the master of photography William Klein, who was also a student of Fernand Léger. In 1990, he was the first to create a cross-over between photography and painting, constantly seeking to extend the limits of photography and explore new ways of seeing and understanding images. His "painted contacts", gouache-enhanced enlargements of contact sheets, and his early prints entitled "Abstract" have today become essential parts of his body of work.