The camera captures reality, but not in French photography. The latest exhibition of contemporary French photographers kicking off at central Seoul’s Sungkok Art Museum showcases the art of photography that blurs the line between real and artificial.
 
Ever since the French pioneered the practice in the mid-19th century, photography has at times been disregarded as an art form until it finally began gaining recognition in the late 1970s. 
 
The realm of photography has continued to expand, and now artists are experimenting with how they can transcend the real world, curator Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais said during a press conference at the museum in central Seoul on Wednesday. She has worked as a photography curator at the Pompidou Centre and the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. She is currently the director of the annual Paris-based photography event Photo Days.
 

″The Bird Market #4″ (2021) by Raphaelle Peria, printed with grattage, or scratching off paint, on photograph [SUNGKOK ART MUSEUM]

 
Another task for photographers is how they will strike a balance between traditional photographic techniques and the latest technology, such as artificial intelligence.
 
The French visual art duo Brodbeck & de Barbuat has done exactly that by fully embracing AI in its works. 
 
For “A Parallel History_Study after Man Ray, Tears, 1930-2022” (2022), a black-and-white, close-up image of a woman shedding numerous tears, the duo did not actually take the picture. Rather, the photograph was made by putting descriptive prompts through an AI image generator called Midjourney. The approach questions the role of photography as a medium in present day.
 
The some 80 photographs from 22 contemporary artists fall under the themes of nature, still life, humans and architecture. The pieces also showcase a wide range of photography printing methods that have reproduced unique, versatile images.
 
Pieces like the aforementioned “Tears” were printed by inkjet, a technology that boasts higher quality color photographs and is often used in home printers. A different technique, called photogravure, involves etching an image into a copper plate through light or chemicals and then printing it on paper by applying ink. It has a deep history that stems back to the 19th century.
 

″A Garden for Eugene D._Honeysuckle″ by Flore, printed with photogravure [SUNGKOK ART MUSEUM]

 
Some pieces still remain deeply rooted in the real world. Artist Flore used flowers from her own garden to create the photogravure prints for her “Garden for Eugene D” series.
 
“It’s an exploration of how these traditional photographic methods go hand in hand with art,” de l’Ecotais said.
 
“French Photography Today: A New Vision of Reality” continues until Aug. 18. The Sungkok Art Museum is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day except on Mondays. Tickets are 10,000 won ($7) for adults.

BY SHIN MIN-HEE [shin.minhee@joongang.co.kr]

Nan Goldin

Gagosian Open, 83 Charing Cross Road, WC2H 0AA, 30 May-23 June

& Gagosian Shop, 28–29 Burlington Arcade, W1J 0QJ, until 22 June

Fifteen years ago, Nan Goldin was so financially stretched that she was forced to sell off precious items in her personal collection of artworks and curiosities at auction. Now, she tops ArtReview’s Power 100 and she’s represented by Gagosian. The mega-gallery has two concurrent exhibitions during London Gallery Weekend that revisit the photographer’s formative moments. Sisters, Saints, Sibyls reprises her three-channel video installation making parallels between martyrdom, rebellion and her sister’s suicide—a defining moment in Goldin’s life that ultimately led her to run away from home and eventually become an artist. (The venue is a former Welsh chapel turned legendary 1980s nightclub, the Limelight, on Charing Cross Road, which seems particularly apt.)

And some of her earliest works are presented at Gagosian’s Shop space in Burlington Arcade—black-and-white photographs from the mid-1970s of her chosen family, Boston’s transgender community, captured at home and at drag club, The Other Side. Downstairs, she has curated a reading room of books by artists and writers she admires, as well as publications about her own work.

Dayanita Singh

Frith Street Gallery, 17-18 Golden Square, W1F 9JJ, until 29 June

For the Delhi-based artist Dayanita Singh, as for many of her photographic contemporaries, the book doesn’t just take precedence, it is her primary medium. Her preoccupation with the archive as a repository for endless play and interpretation informs her experiments with bookmaking and—increasingly—installation, leading her to create “mobile museums” that can be reconfigured in response to a particular space or, indeed, within a reader’s hands.

Now, for the first time, she has made a sculptural work that contains no photographs at all. Abstract it may be, but it remains in keeping with the rest of her work, clearly referencing book shelves, and continuing her fascination with architectural forms. Elsewhere, she presents a new series of wall-based “constructed contact sheets”, drawing on photographic subjects that range from the Ellora Caves to Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Chapel and references to her own installations in museum spaces.

Annette Kelm

Herald St, 43 Museum Street, WC1A 1LY, 31 May-14 July

Domino is the third exhibition devoted to Annette Kelm at Herland St, which presents a new series of constructed still-life photographs, made while the Berlin-based artist was in Ireland. Here she presents playful and surprising contexts for everyday objects, continuing to borrow from the visual language of commercial photography to create deliberately obscure fictional narratives.

In his text accompanying her 2016 show at the gallery, Jonathan Watts described her photographs as containing “autonomous worlds, lyrical correspondences of texture, pattern, density, weight, light and colour”. And in this latest work, Kelm seems to have taken this idea and run with it: a horse figurine trots across a neon-coloured plinth that echos the fast food motif of the pop backdrop; a blue lampshade sprouts a sprig of pink magnolia, set against a diamond-pattern landscape. The trick is that the objects brought together in the frame appear like they always belonged.

Alina Frieske

Pipeline, 35 Eastcastle St, W1W 8DW, until 2 June

At first glance, Alina Frieske’s works give the appearance of conventional, figurative painting. They are anything but. Her compositions are, in fact, made up images sourced from search engines—a kind of conversation between how humans understand images, and how algorithms interpret them. The young German’s latest series, Nightly Newsfeed, considers “the physicality of touch in relation to digital media and devices”, she tells The Art Newspaper, reflecting on how we have “become accustomed to receiving unsorted visual information“ direct to our fingertips.

It’s an interesting subject for a young gallery whose mission is to provide emerging artists with “the right environment to introduce their work in an authentic way”, a counterpoint to the 15 seconds of fame offered by social media.

Hannah Starkey

Maureen Paley, 60 Three Colts Lane, E2 6GQ, until 14 July

“My work is a way of speaking to women about how you don’t always need to perform for the gaze, that there is more to being female than being seen,” said Hannah Starkey, in conversation with Lauren Elkin at The Hepworth, which staged a major survey exhibition of the Northern Irish photographer in 2022. Now she’s back with her eighth solo show at Maureen Paley, presenting her ever-increasingly collaborative portraits of young women, using reflection and refraction to disrupt what she terms “the consuming eye”.

Other photography shows around London:

Jack Pierson, Lisson Gallery, until 3 August

Aisha Seriki: Ori Inu at Doyle Wham, until 27 July

Ana Viktoria Dzinic: Repetitive, Nicoletti, until 3 June

Lisa Jahovic: The Third Drawer at Flowers, Cork Street, until 22 June

Sharon Walters, HackelBury, until 6 July

For decades, the incredible street photography of Charlie Phillips has been criminally overlooked and largely unseen by the public. But now a Kickstarter campaign aims to finally give Phillips’ life’s work the spotlight it deserves in the form of a beautiful book collection.

Now in his 80s, Charlie has been called “the greatest photographer you’ve never heard of” by Time Out and “the most important (yet least lauded) Black photographer of his generation” by online magazine The Root.

Born in Jamaica, he spent his early childhood with his grandparents after his parents had migrated to Britain. At the age of 11, he, too, made the journey to England, joining his parents in 1956. As a teen, he acquired a camera left behind at a house party by an American GI. He taught himself to use it by reading a book he bought in Boots on how to take photos and developing his prints in the family bathroom when his parents were in bed.

Poetic intimacy

The black-and-white photos he took poetically captured the lives of ordinary people in London’s Notting Hill neighbourhood, a centre for immigrants from the Caribbean that was characterised by racism and poverty. Subjects included parties, street scenes, flashy “rude boys” in their zoot suits, families, musicians, and more.

These impromptu portraits have an intimacy that speaks to Charlie’s ability to connect with his subjects. Their relaxed nature in these shots speaks of his own spontaneous style and personality, as well as telling a bigger story of a changing London and Britain.

In recent years, Charlie has called the ordinary people he shot in Notting Hill “the silent minority”, a strata of society whose lives would have gone undocumented had they not had an artist living among them, taking photos with them barely noticing.

Not that he ever saw himself that way. “I was a grassroots photographer,” Charlie says. “I was just an ordinary black guy from the ghetto – a bit radical, part of the alternative culture of that time. My associations lay with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Che Guevara, and the Beat Generation.”

Success in Europe

After joining the Merchant Navy, Phillips travelled widely throughout Europe, to Sweden, Switzerland, France, and Italy. Caught up in the protest movements of the late 1960s, he took photographs of the student riots in Paris and Rome. He also took paparazzi-style pictures of celebrities, including Omar Sharif, Gina Lollobrigida and Muhammad Ali.

After meeting legendary director Federico Fellini, Phillips was hired as an extra in the 1969 film Satyricon. He then worked as a freelance photographer for magazines like Vogue Italia and had his first exhibition in Milan in 1972, entitled Il Frustrazi, which portrayed the lives of urban migrant workers.

However, despite his success, the British cultural establishment repeatedly shut doors on Phillips in the 1970s, unable to believe a self-taught black photographer from the “ghetto” could achieve such artistic heights.

It took decades, but Phillips has now finally started receiving the accolades he always deserved, with historians like Simon Schama hailing him as “one of Britain’s great photo-portraitists… a visual poet; chronicler, champion, witness of a gone world.”

Celebrating his legacy

Now, London’s Bluecoat Press has launched a Kickstarter to publish a gorgeous, carefully curated photo book titled Charlie Phillips – A Grassroots Legacy. With over 100 tri-tone printed images, it promises to be a comprehensive celebration of this unsung master’s incredible body of work.

As the Kickstarter puts it, “Respect has been a long time coming for the great Charlie Phillips, but – with your help – it is finally here.” For fans of street and documentary photography, this is a campaign worth backing to honour one of Britain’s most vital and underappreciated living photographers.

Each month, Citywire Selector’s sister site Citywire France puts a fund selector in the spotlight. 

This time it’s the turn of Lucas Strojny, a fund manager in the diversified management division of Mandarine Gestion (formerly Meeschaert AM/Amilton AM).

In addition to a professional profile, Strojny answered 10 questions about his career, vision and activity, as well as two topical questions.