12 june - 3 october 2021
The Musée Réattu welcomes the work of photographer Graziano Arici, born in Venice in 1949 and based in Arles since 2012. Since the beginning of his career in 1979, in parallel with reportage commissions received for numerous photographic agencies and Venetian institutions, he has developed a body of personal work, which is being exhibited today for the first time.
Advocating the approach of the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), instantaneous photography, «poor» subjects, social, «vernacular» photography, he relates to this historical photography with the technical means of the 21st century (mobile phone, scanner, DSLR) particularly in his black and white series. He produces works which, beyond representation, through the rigour of his compositions, the work on light and contrasts, understandably make him one of the photographers to take a place in the museum’s collection.
The artist takes a sometimes ironic (Caarnival series), often acerbic or even concerned look at the state of the world (The State of Things, Lost Objects, Heart of Darkness), without complacency (Le Grand Tour), plastic (Angels, Polaroids, The Winter of our Discontent). He revisits the past, his own (Als das Kind Kind war), but also his creation, drawing upon his own images, sometimes made several decades earlier, to give them new meaning within a series. He practices «salvaging», collecting images (glass plates, old negatives, images broadcast on television) which he appropriates (Angels, The Winter of our Discontent, Heart of Darkness).
The photographer has favoured the square format since his research with Polaroids in the 1980s and his work in medium format. It is also his systematic approach, one he has used since 2012, to experiment almost immediately on social networks with his photographic work, without automatic cropping, that guides him. The shots, whether taken with a mobile phone or a digital SLR, are thus taken directly in this challenging format.
The exhibition entitled "Now is the Winter of our Discontent", (the first sentence of the monologue from Shakespeare’s Richard III, Act I, scene 1), presents in a selection of more than 400 images from 9 series, taken between 1979 and 2020, an archive of the world (Albania, Germany, England, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Spain, United States, France, Georgia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Russia, Slovakia, Switzerland), a «state of things».
