Variations 2.18

"Variations 2.18"

from Thursday, January 25, 2018 to Sunday, March 11, 2018

Galerie XII Paris

This new and ever more dreamlike series is a continuation of Baghir's work. For years, he has been exploring the possibilities of 35mm film, playing with filters designed by him, looking for very specific exposure and light conditions. His photographs are part of the pictorialist tradition inaugurated at the end of the 19th century.
Exploring traditional genres such as portraiture or landscape, the pictorialists endeavored to put forward the vision of the subject and to transform the real through various processes such as blur or chiaroscuro effects, or more sophisticated printing techniques. The founders of this movement, such as Robert Demachy (1859-1936) in France, Alvin Coburn (1882-1966) or Edward Steichen (1879-1973) in the United States had the ambition to break with an industrial vision of photography to favor the artistic sensibility of photographers. But it was Albert Steiglitz (1864-1946) who really established himself as the leader of this movement, imposing photography through his magazine "Camera Works" and organizing the first museum exhibitions in New York.
In his b & w photographs, Baghir creates foggy atmospheres, plays on the grain of the image, the shades of gray, blurs the reading and leads the eye to penetrate into dreamlike visions. For some of his Variations 2.18, he abandons the b & w for color and gets closer to impressionism