PARIS — At Paris Photo 2023, Hans P. Kraus Jr. and Jean-Kenta Gauthier, Paris, are pleased to present a joint project in adjacent booths. Light-Years, an unprecedented contemporary project, stages a series of literal and conceptual dialogues between works by 19th century masters and contemporary artists. Each dialogue seeks to identify the contemporary in historical photographic materials and to establish the historicity of contemporary photographic practices thereby providing a commentary on the evolution of the medium since its inception.
Light-Years
Hans P. Kraus, Jr. & Jean-Kenta Gauthier at Paris Photo 2023 | Booths C10 & D11
Eugène ATGET (1857-1927) David HORVITZ (b. 1981)
Anna ATKINS (1799-1871) Alfredo JAAR (b. 1956)
Daniel BLAUFUKS (b. 1963) Rev. Calvert Richard JONES (1802-1877)
Julia Margaret CAMERON (1815-1879) Daido MORIYAMA (b. 1938)
Robert CUMMING (1943-2021) Hanako MURAKAMI (b. 1984)
Louis Jacques Mandé DAGUERRE (1787-1851) NADAR (Gaspard-Felix Tournachon; 1820-1910)
Raphael DALLAPORTA (b. 1980) Adrien TOURNACHON (1825-1903)
Giuseppe ENRIE (1886-1961) Stephanie SOLINAS (b. 1978)
Roger FENTON (1819-1869) William Henry Fox TALBOT (1800-1877)
Gustave LE GRAY (1820-1884) Joseph Vicomte VIGIER (1821-1894)
John Beasley GREENE (1832-1856) Daisuke YOKOTA (b. 1983)
Mishka HENNER (b. 1976)
After Anna Atkins, one of the earliest women photographers, produced British Algae, the first published book printed and illustrated with photography, she turned her love of the photogram toward the production of images for sheer visual pleasure. “Lycopodium (Ceylon),” a unique cyanotype of the 1850s, is a striking precursor of the expressive photography of twentieth century and contemporary artists.
About Hanako Murakami’s Possibility No. 6 (Thermography), a unique work made in 2022, the artist remarks, “Photography began on pieces of paper impregnated with silver chloride, or on silver plates, or on polished and shiny limestone covered with pine tar, or on silver plates covered with rosin, or on sheets of silver exposed to iodine, or on heated copper plates, etc. At one time, the methods follow one another, and some are carried over to the next experiment. Others, on the contrary, are abandoned. It is in these experiments, now all lost, that the field of possibilities lies.”
One in a series of poetic and meditative seascapes that brought Gustave Le Gray international acclaim for their technical and artistic achievement, Ocean, solar effect in the clouds, a fine albumen print from a collodion negative, demonstrates his mastery of the medium with a tour de force combination of clouds, empty sea and sun. The seascapes Le Gray created between 1856 and 1858 are the works for which he is most celebrated.
Covariance (2015), by Raphaël Dallaporta, is a set of 48 mathematical objects made from 48 mathematical functions incorporating a covariance principle, a concept used in probability theory and statistics. Developed in collaboration with Alexandre Brouste (Professor of Mathematics at Le Mans University, France) and materialized in the form of blue cyanotypes over platinum-palladium prints, these originally abstract images offer, thanks to the techniques employed, the illusion of pieces of clouds in a dark, almost cosmic sky.