Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
79 Rue des Archives
75003 Paris
“I chose the portrait as my subject…”. For almost thirty years now, the presence of the other in the image, its subtle and mysterious emanation, has been at the heart of Finnish photographer Marjaana Kella’s work. What does it mean to make a portrait? Between 1997 and 2001, she produced portraits of people under hypnosis. Her aim was to explore the discrepancy between inner state and outer appearance. In the same period, she also photographed subjects facing away from the camera. She knows that in traditional portraiture, the face, the eyes and expression are the focus of attention. “The face of the Other calls me to respond”, wrote Emmanuel Levinas. By obliterating this mark of presence in the world, Kella seeks to draw attention to the image itself. What is a photograph? Experimental methods involve changing parameters of the experiment in order to identify how those affect the outcome. This is precisely what Kella does with the process of representation. She questions the way portraits are done, but also the way we look at them.
Though this Finnish photographer’s portraits have had a major impact on the history of photography, they have however been exhibited very rarely. L’envers du portrait [Reversing the Portrait] is the first French solo exhibition of this rare artist’s work.