|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Remembering the Iron Curtain
| Article
# : |
19944 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
1,358 Words |
| Author
: |
Mavis Guinard
Mavis Guinard, a writer on the arts, lives in Switzerland. |
"We wanted to show what life had been behind the Iron Curtain, while in the West we had just gone on with our own lives. We wanted to show how stifling, how boring, how harsh life was under a totalitarian regime."
A former journalist, now curator of Lausanne's Musee de l'Elysee, Charles-Henri Favrod has a single passion in life: to show the world's most outstanding photographs. He ranges far and wide to find them for what has become in the last five years Europe's top photography museum.
"For years," Favrod explains, "we kept in touch with photographers behind the Iron Curtain but felt it would be too dangerous for them to hold a show here, even if they were not overtly critical." Despite martial law, despite censorship, one underground group of fifteen Polish photographers, Demanti, never stopped taking pictures. Among other events, the Demanti photographers covered every struggle of the Solidarity movement. In the summer of 1989 Favrod and his assistants went to Poland to arrange a show. "We were impressed by their creativity," he recalls.
The uprisings of 1989 prompted Favrod to continue on to Prague, East Berlin, and Bucharest. "We decided we had to show the events of 1990. We collected four thousand photographs and weeded them down to two thousand." The photographers were sent the materials needed to develop prints selected from reproductions or contact sheets.
Though elegantly spacious, the eighteenth-century mansion facing Lake Leman that houses the Musee de l'Elysee was not large enough to host such a large show. Hang the costs, the museum decided to rent a utilitarian exhibition hall for a month. Entrance tickets just covered rental and expenses. After the show closed in Lausanne, five hundred pictures were sent to Arles; the major part of the exhibit went to Amsterdam and Prague.
Favrod decided to make the Lausanne display neither didactic nor geographical. The hundred photographers from Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Lithuania, Ukraine, and East Germany were very different: Some had lived through a long ordeal, others were very young, and some may have been official photographers. But even those working for the regime "could not help but show the totalitarian impact on daily living," says Favrod. In troubled times, a few took refuge in aestheticism. Yet even nominally artistic pictures could prove dangerous. By posing her models against patriotic monuments, Gabriela Farova spelled out a clear
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
