| National Gallery of Victoria | FREE | Call venue for more details
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Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday every 1 weeks between Saturday 18 October 2008 and Sunday 19 April 2009
"In a letter from 1920, the French photographer Eugène Atget wrote that, “this assemblage, artistic and documentary in character, is now complete. I can say I possess all of Old Paris.” Atget was referring to the culmination of his slow and systematic documentation, over many years, of the streets, shop fronts and buildings of the city. Atget had created a veritable archive of Paris, a photographically exact transcription of his surroundings that went beyond mere documentation.
Atget’s idea of possession through visual records relates to the concept of the archive, as both a collection of data and also as a repository of this information. Photography has long been used to both record and collect visual images of the world, connected to a sense of cultural memory. As a form of cataloguing, photography has the ability to document life, objects and architecture as a type of archive - and by collecting and grouping images together, artists and historians have been able to make sense of photographs by formulating patterns and creating patterns of logic of the world around them.
This exhibition brings together artists from the NGV Collection drawn from different historical periods that are joined in their exploration of the ‘possessive’ and archival capacity of photography, and the ways in which knowledge and memory can be shaped by these archives.
Artists include: Candida Höfer, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Eugène Atget, Patrick Pound, Les Levine, Christine Cornish, Albert Renger-Patsch, Andrew Hurle.
Image details:
Front Entrance
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Photo: NGV Photographic Services"
