GUSTAV JANOUCH REPORTS IN HIS CONVERSATIONS WITH KAFKA:
“In the spring of 1921, two of those instant photo booths which had just been invented abroad were installed in Prague, which captured sixteen or perhaps more different expressions of the subject on a sheet of paper. Arriving at Kafka’s with one of these series of photos, I declared in a cheerful tone: ‘For a few crowns one can have oneself photographed from every angle. This device is a Know thyself mechanized.
– You probably mean: Misunderstand yourself! said Kafka with a fine smile.
Je protests:
” What do you mean ? Photography doesn’t lie, though!
– Who tells you she’s not lying? »
Kafka tilted his head on his shoulder:
“Photography links the gaze to the surface of things and generally camouflages their hidden nature, which only filters like a moving chiaroscuro through their physiognomy.
The most precise lenses cannot capture this. Only sensitivity can do so, and by trial and error.
Do you believe that the unfathomable reality, which in all past ages legions of poets, scholars and other magicians have faced in the anguish of their desires and hopes… that this reality which is constantly eluding us, we are now going to reach it by simply pressing the button of a four-penny mechanism?… I doubt it.
This automatic device does not represent an improvement of the human eye, it represents only a dizzying simplification of the fly’s eye.” (Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafkapublished by Maurice Nadeau, translated by Bernard Lortholary, 1998.
The guest
FRANCIS CHEVAL
Born in 1954 in Belfort, François Cheval lives and works in Chalon-sur-Saône, the city of the invention of photography.
Trained in history and ethnology, François Cheval has worked as a museum curator since 1982, successively from the conservation of the Jura museums, to the Léon Dierx museum in Reunion, to end his career at the Nicéphore Niépce museum in Chalon-sur-Saône. From 1996 to 2016, as director of the photography museum, he undertook to rid photography of its presuppositions and to present the originality of the “photographic” through a renewed museography and discourse.
In keeping with the projects developed outside museums, he continues today his activities as artistic director and exhibition curator, striving to challenge the certainties of the medium and the world of photography, by creating moments of discovery, questioning and, perhaps, pleasure.
François Cheval founded the Lianzhou Museum of Photography (2017-2021) with Duan Yuting and is now director of the Mougins Photographic Center, which he created in 2020.
He has published in particular:
« The Museum Test », Photographic studies (no. 11, 2002)
« Preserve and exhibit photography at the museum »,
« Disappointment, melancholy and misunderstanding, against the fatality of the museum visit: the coherent fiction or the last chance of the photography museum », Museums and public collections of France (no. 251, 2007);
« The impossible museum of photography: the era of collusions », in Exhibition and media, photography, cinema, television directed by Olivier Lugon (L’Âge d’homme, 2012);
and with Yasmine Chemali, The factory of illusions (Sursock Museum, 2019).
And most recently, “ The Herschel Course, the construction of the idea of value in photography » ( Photographica, n°8. 2024)
Sound Archive
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The exhibition at the Museum of Art and History of Judaism
THE EXHIBITION
As part of the Cultural Olympiad, the mahJ is devoting an exhibition to the Hungarian-born photographer André Steiner, pioneer of the New Vision, who expressed his talent by capturing athletic and moving bodies in Paris in the 1930s.
The guest book
WHAT WE HAVEN’T FINISHED LOVINGpublished by Le Bec en l’air
The intimate and sensual family album of a great photographer from the 1930s. Photographs André Steiner. Texts François Cheval & Arnaud Cathrine.
André Steiner is one of the main representatives of the New Vision, a photographic movement which, in the 1920s and 1930s, participated in the European avant-garde movement marked by the effervescence of all forms of art.
The originality of this book lies in the fact that it focuses on an episode in Steiner’s private life, his meeting with his future wife, Lily, and ten intense and passionate years of their romantic and family history. The photos in the book, reproduced from original period prints, show that the artist dealt with deeply intimate subjects with the same aesthetic demands as the rest of his work. Passionate about the nude, André Steiner makes his body and that of his wife the subject of his artistic research. Lily’s nudes are among the finest in 1930s photography, combining technical rigor and precision of movement with sensuality. And when Nicole, their daughter, is born, it is the same love that shines through in the maternity photos, images of seemingly infallible happiness.
As François Cheval, curator of the Niépce museum, writes, the photographer “could not separate creation from reality” and “seized on the photography of the family space as an opportunity and an attempt at intellectual and artistic. »
At the end of the book, there are facsimile reproductions of the front pages and press articles from the time, which include André Steiner’s photos. The writer Arnaud Cathrine, whose taste for family stories is well-known, extends this rare album with a portrait of Nicole, André and Lily’s daughter, who is still alive and who has undertaken a long and patient work to make this unknown part of her father’s work known.
