Julie Jones: The collection of the National Museum of Modern Art began to be formed when the Center Pompidou opened. It contains more than 40 prints and 000 negatives and is inalienable. It is a public collection so acquisitions are decided not on impulse but according to knowledge of the history of photography and the history of art and objective choices. The collection of Marin Karmitz (founder of MK60 editor's note) includes around 000 prints acquired since the beginning of the 2s. It is a private collection which therefore belongs only to him and where he can react according to his favorites and his preferences. passions. It is the reflection of a single man while the Center Pompidou collection is the national collection. This dialogue between private and public had never been done. We were able to do it first of all thanks to this complementarity, but also thanks to the personality of Marin Karmitz, who has been an actor in culture in France for so many years. It is an exception for its investment in French culture.

JJ: Which also answers “why Marin Karmitz?” » Because ultimately there are plenty of private collectors of photographs in France, and very good ones. It turns out that Marin Karmitz's collection is really, and quite surprisingly, complementary to ours in the sense that he collected several great figures in the history of photography who are absent from our collections for various and varied reasons - often mostly financial. For example, he made a donation to the museum a year and a half ago from his collection of photographs by Stanislaw Witkiewicz, a Polish artist who is not present in any other collection in the world. Its collection also contains great figures in the history of American photography such as Lewis Hine and Gordon Parks who are also absent from our collections. It is a duty that we impose on ourselves, at the Center Pompidou, to put together emblematic collections of a photographer's career. Which a private collector does not need to do. Now it's true that Marin Karmitz is very interested in the evolution of a photographer's career, so we found interesting and coherent sets in his collection. He also has an interest in historical photography, with names like Cartier-Bresson and Man Ray. The Center Pompidou holds the world's largest collection of Man Ray negatives. It turns out that he has additional skills, especially in drawing or sculpture. And then his great obsession is obviously the human body. If there is perhaps a common thread in this collection it is this obsession with the human body. When we thought about this exhibition, this question of the body appeared quite obviously. It interested me to examine the museum's collections from this prism because it had never been done. I found that questioning today, in 2023, the question of the body represented, and thereby the way we look at others, this question of presence in the world and our otherness, was particularly relevant.

JJ: It’s an exhibition we’ve been working on together for a long time. We agreed to start from the works, and not from an idea. Starting from a sort of visual ping-pong. Marin Karmitz showed me his Witkiewicz collection and said “what do you say to that?” ". And I had thought of these first heads of Constantin Brancusi made the same year... By dint of dialoguing in this way, we realized that we were in the process of drawing up a history of photography. But above all not a closed and chronological history of photography! When you put two exceptional collections together, you expect a gallery of masterpieces, which tends to confine the subject and then you rarely make an exhibition for several types of audiences in these cases. The idea was rather to construct an exhibition as open as possible, with obviously masterpieces because there are some, but not only that, and to try not to have a dogmatic or chronological discourse, with well-defined categories. defined, but rather to ask in different ways this big question which is how do we see the other. I chose this section which, for me, was really a reflection of our conversations with Marin Karmitz, and then a way of questioning our view of others.

JJ: It was also a desire both on his part and on my part. The question of transmission is very important for Marin Karmitz, not remaining in artifice or anecdote. At the museum it is an institutional duty to transmit information to as many people as possible. Indeed, it’s an exhibition that you can see in different ways: you can just walk around without reading anything, and meet these faces. If we have more time there is a sort of armada of cartels which gives biographical information on the artist and the works.

JJ: There was this desire to introduce the exhibition with a section on the first faces photographed at the beginning of the 20th century. They are innovative in more than one way and in particular for their use of close-ups, as does Stanislav Witkiewicz or Constantin Brancusi. It was extremely rare in photography at that time, it was not even practiced in cinema yet. They also shared this avant-garde look on the face taken in close-up. Witkiewicz's series shows poorly framed photos where faces are cut out. We can clearly see that what interests the photographer is not to make a perfect portrait of his model, but to go inside her. This obviously refers to a whole era of the 20th century, to psychoanalysis, etc. It's the same with Brancusi: he photographed his very first sculptures, when he was not yet the Brancusi we know. The sculpture is still figurative and you have the impression that it emerges from a sort of raw and shapeless mass... At that time he was quite young, he spent his time in Rodin's workshop which worked in the same way, with this idea of ​​bringing out the form of a raw material. Lewis Hine is first and foremost a professional photographer who practices photography to support his actions in defense of children's rights and the rights of migrants. Like Witkiewicz, he will be interested in a particular identity. We see that in his photographs there are anonymous, miserable, poor subjects, of no value to the society of the time and whose rights must be defended. He photographs them almost like movie stars, with extremely stylish lighting, in a composition of images that highlights them, with a sort of total respect for this body, that of the individual alone. Lewis Hine thus launches a whole movement that we will call the “documentary tradition” which also includes Paul Strand, for example, who we find later in the exhibition.

JJ: The idea was to bring these two collections into dialogue on devices and ways of photographing. Let's take the second part of the exhibition dedicated to "Automatism" and the photo booth which is this authorless and systematic device with the aim of administrative and police controls. In our collections, we have plenty of examples of misappropriation of this type of device, starting with the Surrealists, and Marin Karmitz owned several works by Christian Boltanski, notably “27 possibilities of self-portraits” at different ages of his life. Also, in the “Fragment” part, another type of dialogue takes place around Henri Cartier-Bresson: you see two women making love on a bed. This is a very well-known photo by Cartier-Bresson which belongs to the collection of Marin Karmitz. It turns out that the Center Pompidou also has one, less known and taken a second or two later. The two have never or rarely been brought together. The idea was not to contradict Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment, but rather to present them together and reintroduce the narrative element in this specific practical case. A little further along the route, there is the encounter with “the unknown woman of the Seine”. We have the largest collection of Man Ray in the world, in terms of negatives, contact sheets, prints… It turns out that Marin Karmitz owns this wooden Man Ray sculpture representing “the unknown woman of the scene”. This was produced at the same time as illustrations for the reissue of the novel “Aurélien” d'Aragon which is a tribute to “the unknown woman of the Seine”. So we bring together, in the same room, creations by Man Ray around “the unknown woman of the Seine” dating from the same period.

JJ: The problem with this exhibition is that there are only those who are absent! Who hasn't photographed a body part at some point? Who has not made it their entire work? We had to make choices. There are 120 artists in the exhibition, ultimately it's not a lot. It is for this reason also that we wanted to be very clear on the fact that this is not a closed story, these are proposed stories which, I hope, will generate as much more frustration that they will want to complete these stories.

JJ: Two years ago, the Center acquired this set by the American artist of Peruvian origin Tarrah Krajnak exhibited in the “Fragment” section. This 44-year-old artist was the winner of the Louis Roederer Prize with this work acquired by the Center shortly after. A work that is important to me, both contemporary and classic. It hijacks a figure in the history of photography that is Edward Weston, one of the great fathers of the history of current photography with his large nude photos from the beginning of the 20th century. Tarrah Karjnak will reproduce them through a series of self-portraits where we see her, with her distinctive body and her dark skin. We also see that she is holding this pear in her hand which allows her to take the photo. It's a very beautiful proposal for comments on the history of photography: a takeover of the feminine in this history of photography, but which is also a tribute to this classic photography since she works on film, by shooting her -even with extreme care in small formats… A whole reference to the history of photography and the history of art from the 70s associated with performance art and feminist art. A busy work and at the same time very simple.