| | | | | | | | Republic of Congo, 2013, Scene #5370 © Alex Majoli / Magnum Photos
Pointe Noire. Political gathering with local government members. | | | | | | SCENE | | | | 22 February – 28 April 2019 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Republic of Congo, 2013, Scene #9928 © Alex Majoli / Magnum Photos
Brazzaville stadium, with Red Devils supporters. | | | | | | EUROPE, ASIA, BRAZIL, CONGO. FOR EIGHT YEARS, ACROSS CONTINENTS AND COUNTRIES, ALEX MAJOLI HAS PHOTOGRAPHED EVENTS AND NON-EVENTS.
Political demonstrations, humanitarian emergencies and quiet moments of daily life. What holds all these disparate images together, at first glance at least, is the quality of light and the sense of human theatre. A sense that we are all actors attempting, failing and resisting the playing of parts that history and circumstance demand; and a sense that we are all interconnected. Somehow.
Majoli’s photographs result from his own performance. Entering a situation, he and his assistants slowly go about setting up a camera and lights. This activity is a kind of spectacle in itself, observed by those who may eventually be photographed. Majoli begins to shoot, offering no direction to people who happen to be in their own lives before his camera. This might last twenty minutes, or even an hour or more. Sometimes the people adjust their actions in anticipation of an image to come, refining their gestures in self-consciousness. Sometimes they are too preoccupied with the intensity of their own lives to even notice. Either way, the representation of drama and the drama of representation become one. | | | | | | | | | China, Shenzhen, 2017, Scene #1350 © Alex Majoli / Magnum Photos
The employees of a beauty parlour participate in a pep rally before starting work. | | | | | | Most of Alex Majoli’s photographs were made during daylight, and he could have easily photographed his scenes with no additional illumination. Flash was not a matter of necessity; it was a choice, an interpretive, responsive choice. Alex Majoli uses very strong flash lighting. It is instantaneous and much brighter than daylight. It illuminates what is near but plunges the surroundings into darkness, or something resembling moonlight. Spaces appear as dimly lit stages and, regardless of the ambient light that exists, everything seems to be happening at the sunless end of the day.
Alex Majoli’s approach to image making constitutes a profound reflection upon the conditions of theatricality that are implicit in both photography and a world we have come to understand as something that is always potentially photographable. If the world is expecting to be photographed, it exists in a perpetual state of potential theatre. In photographs we do not see people, we see people who have fulfilled their potential to be photographed. People in photographs strike us as both actual and fictional at the same time. Actual in that their presence before the camera has been recorded; fictional in that the camera has created a scenic extract from an unknowable drama. | | | | | | | | | Greece, Lesbos, 2015, Scene #0302 © Alex Majoli / Magnum Photos
Northern shores of Lesbos island. | | | | | | The illusionism of photography is inseparable from the contemplation of its illusion. This does not negate the documentary potential of the image although it does imply that documentary itself ought to accept the theatricality of its own premise. His images do this not by resolving the tensions between artwork and document but by dramatizing them, making them thinkable in the midst of our pictorial and documentary encounter with the contemporary world.
- David Campany | | | | | | | | ALEX MAJOLI, SCENE
Co-published by LE BAL and MACK for the exhibition, Alex Majoli - SCENE brings together iconic images from SCENE works by the italian photographer Alex Majoli. Classified by geographical area, the images are accompanied by two unpublished texts, one by David Campany "Alex Majoli’s Theatre of Life" and "Dis-photography" by Corinne Rondeau.
« WE NEVER REALLY SEE PEOPLE OR PLACES: WE SEE THE LIGHT THEY REFLECT. AND THE QUALITY OF THAT LIGHT AFFECTS HOW WE UNDERSTAND THEM. » — DAVID CAMPANY
38 x 22.5 cm
Texts by David Campany and Corinne Rondeau
35 euros
Publication date: 21 February 2019
Co-published by LE BAL and MACK
With the support of the Istituto italiano di cultura. |
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