Scenography

Arles, July 2019.

To obtain a photo is to compose a frame, an exposure, to modify the image whether in silver or digital form, to make a print on a specific paper, in a suitable format, with a frame. To go from the photo to the exhibition, you have to select among the thousands of shots, group them together and arrange them. The exhibition will define a narrative for the spectators who will follow a path defined by order, light and walls.
This scenography itself produces its own traces: here, on a simple paper with lines, Susan Meiselas defined the relevant assemblies to report her long experience of carnival stripperss, hesitated on their respective places, moved and deleted, added, before stablising her exhibition at the Brockton Art Centre in 1978.
More than 40 years later, thanks to these traces, the exhibition seems to be reproduced here in Arles. If the walls are different, if the prints are not period prints, if the artist is no longer a young Harvard graduate, but a renowned photographer, the scenography remains almost the same. The photos and texts planned are accompanied by this draft and other traces, displayed under glass and with their cartel. It is no longer just a photographic exhibition, but the exhibition of a photographic exhibition that we are photographing.