Often, what we see in front of us is preconceived. Representations of the other or others are reduced to a few simple and reductive formulas. Common sense attributes physical and behavioural characteristics that are perpetuated unchallenged. Societies and individuals rely on stereotypes to diminish reality. Bayeté Ross Smith, an African-American artist, bases his work on the strength and constancy of prejudice: on what could be called the pre-viewed. In his staged photographs, characters are given different personalities depending on their attitude, their appearance and occasionally their words. It becomes difficult to know what the true “nature” of these individuals really is. Society, in particular American society, has a tendency to essentialise, in other words to reduce people to a trait considered significant. By generalising, we distort and thereby turn characterisation into the definition of our own identity by distancing others from ourselves.

“Bayeté Ross Smith: Beyond Appearances” is the second part of an African-American trilogy. It follows the exhibition “Stephen Shames: Comrade Sisters / Women of the Black Panther Party” and will be followed in the summer of 2025 by “Kwame Brathwaite: Black is Beautiful”.

The exhibition “Bayeté Ross Smith: Beyond Appearances” is part of the PhotoSaintGermain
festival program in partnership with the Musée national Eugène-Delacroix.
“Our Kind of People : Bayeté Ross Smith”, 31.10.2024 – 3.02.2025, Musée national Eugène-Delacroix.

Biography

Bayeté Ross Smith is a multidisciplinary artist, photographer, visual journalist, and filmmaker working at the intersection of photography, film, video, visual journalism, 3D objects, and new media. He is Columbia University Law School Artist-in-Residence, a TED speaker, a Clinton Foundation and George W. Bush Presidential Leadership Scholar, a Creative Capital Awardee, a CatchLight Global Fellow, as well as a New York Times embedded mediamaker.
His artistic practice encourages people to question their preexisting beliefs by inviting them to examine how cultural perspectives and biases influence how we perceive stories and, in turn, the concept of truth. Drawing on the concepts of identity and community, Bayeté Ross Smith studies and deconstructs ideas of beauty, value, and reciprocity. Identity is both a performance and a set of characteristics in service to controlled images and media that define individuals and cultures globally.
The Mougins Center of Photography is dedicating its first solo exhibition in France and Europe to him. His work has been presented at the Lincoln Center (New York), the Sheffield DocFest, and the LA Film Festival. His collaborative projects have been showcased at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008 and 2012, and his works are part of the collections of The Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, the Oakland Museum of California, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and The Brooklyn Museum (New York). Additionally, he has created public art projects with Fondation Carmignac, CatchLight and Dysturb, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, the City of White Plains NY, The Lenfest Center for the Arts at Columbia University, the Northeast Sculpture Social Justice Billboard Project, the NYC Parks Department, the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, the Jerome Foundation, and the Hartford YMCA.

© Bayeté Ross Smith
Mirrors Study 3: Rixy, 2010
Digigraphie on Hahnemühle, Photo Rag Baryta

©  Bayeté Ross Smith
Who Is a Threat? Who Is a Victim? 2020

Opening 27.06 – 19:00

Curators: François Cheval and Yasmine Chemali

Stephen Shames was twenty years old when, as a student at Berkeley, he came into contact with the beginnings of what would later become the Black Panther Party. From that moment onwards, he followed the history of this movement for emancipation within the Civil Rights movement until its dissolution. Benefitting from the friendship of the principle leaders, in particular Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, the photographer could report freely on all the forms of a political organisation that wanted to be involved in every aspect of the African-American community, from food aid to education, health to security. A relatively unknown aspect of the Black Panther Party, which these photographs bring to light, is the place occupied by activists within the organisation. Women, some of whom would go on to achieve certain notoriety (Gloria Abernethy, Evon Carter, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, Ericka Huggins, Adrienne Humphrey), were on the front line of every struggle. They were the ones who set up free breakfasts for schoolchildren, medical clinics and schools, distributed the media and so forth. Of all ages and walks of life, they represented two-thirds of the organisation’s activists. As speakers and organisers, these activists were committed to redefining the role of women within the organisation itself! This lends an original dimension to the story, providing it with a distinctive resonance.

Biography

Born in 1947 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, Stephen Shames was a student at the University of Berkeley in California when, at the age of 20, he met Bobby Seale, founder of the Black Panther Party, during an anti-Vietnam War protest in San Francisco. As the party’s privileged photographer, he became its main chronicler for seven years, from 1967 to 1973. Feeling more like an activist than a mere bystander, he decided to make photography a form of political engagement and the Black Panthers’ struggle his primary battleground. As a photojournalist, Stephen Shames captured life on the streets of the Bronx, particularly focusing on youth (‘Bronx Boys’, 1970-1980).

Known for his documentary and socially conscious work, he delved into issues of social misery and poverty, particularly that of children, a subject on which he testified before the United States Senate in 1986. In his own words, his approach is ‘to give a voice to those who are denied it’, without staging or resorting to pathos. In particular, he addresses child poverty and racial or prison issues to draw attention to social problems in the United States, much like photographers Lewis Hine, Jacob Riis, or Marion Post Wolcott did before him.

Stephen Shames has received numerous awards for his work, and his prints are in the largest public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York), Metropolitan Museum (New York), Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (Washington, DC), George Eastman Museum (Rochester, NY), International Center of Photography (New York), Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, DC), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The New York Public Library, The Bancroft Library (Berkeley), University of California (Berkeley), The Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), The Museum of Photographic Arts San Diego, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Civil Rights Museum (Memphis, TN), Oakland Museum of California, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York). He has authored over ten monographs, including Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers by Stephen Shames and Bobby Seale (Abrams Books, 2016) and The Black Panthers (Aperture, 2006).

This exhibition takes part of the Rencontres d’Arles program as part of the Grand Arles Express manifestation.

© Stephen Shames
Earlene Coleman préparant les sacs de provisions
à distribuer au Laney College,
mars 1972,
Oakland, Californie.

Opening 1.03, 18:30

Encounter with the artist 2.03 – 15:00

Curators: François Cheval, Yasmine Chemali

A colourful world, a world in which reality is divided into sequences as if in a film. Photography has so many difficulties in understanding reality that it must create its own version, and if it is to do that, it may as well reflect a personal world, under the amused and protective gazes of Henri Matisse and Josef Albers.
Sometimes, the photographer must return to the fundamentals, knowing how to set values and arrange colours on sheets of paper, letting them live and arranging them. Perception cannot be thought. It is self-evident. It cannot be measured. What if, as Jessica Backhaus wishes, it were explored by associating feelings and virtues with primary colours. A vision that is simultaneously reassuring and disturbing, between pleasure and questioning.
Of course, colour is make-up. It deceives and seduces us. Observe too closely and become hypnotised. The images of Jessica Backhaus also possess a hypnotic power. And yet they are nothing more than paper, light, pure colour and shadow, yet somehow they provide the images with a vibrancy, a life of their own.

Biography

Jessica Backhaus (Germany/USA) was born in Cuxhaven, Germany in 1970 and grew up in an artistic family. At the age of sixteen, she moved to Paris, where she later studied photography and visual communications. Here she met Gisele Freund in 1992, who became her mentor. In 1995 her passion for photography drew her to New York, where she assisted photographers, pursued her own projects and lived until 2009.
Jessica Backhaus is regarded as one of the most distinguished voices in contemporary photography in Germany today. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, MARTa Herford and the Kunsthalle Erfurt. To date, she has ten publications to her name. Nine of them are published by Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg.
Her photographs are in many prominent art collections including Taunus Sparkasse, Germany, Art Collection Deutsche Börse, Germany, ING Art Collection, Belgium, Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA and the Margulies Collection, Miami, USA. Jessica Backhaus is represented by Robert Morat Galerie in Berlin, Galerie Anja Knoess in Cologne, Petra Becker/ International Art Bridge in Meggen, Robert Klein Gallery in Boston, Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia, MiCamera Gallery in Milan, Carlos Carv lho
ARTE CONTEMPORÂNEA in Lisbon and Wouter van Leeuwen Gallery in Amsterdam.

Curators: François Cheval, Yasmine Chemali
With the support of Frame Contemporary Art Finland.

Biography

Anna Niskanen (born in 1990 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish emerging artist. She approaches photography through alternative printing processes, creating large-scale installations of handmade prints. An overarching theme in her body of work – a continuous flow of unique prints – is memory of place and nature. She builds an archive of photographs and ecofacts collected while visiting places. This vast library of images and natural objects is then used to recreate images in new compositions.

During her graduate studies at Aalto University Photography Programme (Finland), Niskanen developed a distinct aesthetic by exploring photography in printmaking. She was first introduced to the possibilities and limitations of light sensitive materials during her exchange studies at Emily Carr University (Vancouver, Canada). Since then, she has been enhancing her process further in her Helsinki studio as well as artist residencies abroad.

Her work takes on the subject of her surroundings and the following exhibitions are typically designed for their specific spaces. Her collection of works called ‘Oyster’ was made of and during her multiple artist residency stays at SÍM in Reykjavik, Iceland. The work was inspired by the surrounding waterscapes, water in all its different forms.

‘Point Sublime’ follows this paradigm. During an artist residency in the southeast of France, Niskanen has explored, learnt, saw and collected material. The resulting installation at the Mougins Center of Photography represents her first solo exhibition in France.

Curators: François Cheval and Yasmine Chemali

In partnership with The Harold Feinstein Photography Trust.

This exhibition takes part of the Rencontres d’Arles program as part of the Grand Arles Express manifestation

Harold Feinstein cannot be reduced to a single series. Nevertheless, for this native of Coney Island, this ‘land without shadows’ remains first and foremost the field of his photographic practice and above all the perfect illustration of a certain vision of American society. There is no ‘pure’ contemplation in these images, it is above all an ethical disposition, an aesthetic of the ordinary. There is nothing important in these series of small moments. All of this ultimately composes an ensemble, a great songbook in the midst of the upheavals of American society, with the Great Depression, the exacerbation of racial tensions, McCarthyism, etc.

It was then, in 1952, that the young Harold Feinstein, drafted by the army, found himself in the American expeditionary force in Korea. The format that Harold Feinstein experiments with in the Korean narrative brings together the every day and the art of the blues. He invents a narrative full of shades of grey and delicate contrasts. The slow rhythm and muted tones all provide extreme consistency to a series made up of sensitive appropriation and abandonment of the subject to the photographer’s desire.

Upon his return to the United States, Harold Feinstein established himself in the Jazz Loft, New York, where he met the musicians Hall Overton and Dick Cary. This was the period in which he began his collaboration with the Blue Note Records label. Crucially, he also met W. Eugene Smith, with whom he collaborated on the layout of the Pittsburgh Project.

It is this vision of the world, of photography committed to the benefit of a united humanity, that the photographer seeks to convey. His approach is in some ways close to ‘street photography’. His images taken in the underground or the streets of New York, captured with all their details, form a singular perspective. Narrative worlds unfold yet the work remains a unified whole. Harold Feinstein introduces a singular tension into the narrative aesthetic between accidents and mirror effects; the work is an entity that imposes itself as an immediate sentiment, held together by its style rather than its subject matter.

Biography Harold Feinstein (1931-2015)

Born in 1931 on Coney Island in the state of New York, to Jewish immigrant parents, Harold Feinstein began taking photographs in 1946, aged 15 and armed with a Rolleiflex. At 16 he quit school and the following year, in 1948, he became the youngest member of the Photo League, alongside Sid Grossman. His work was soon acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York), entering the permanent collection under the direction of Edward Steichen. From 1954 he began showing his work both in collective exhibitions (Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA) and individually (George Eastman House, Limelight Gallery).

Recognised as an important figure of the New York avant-garde for his street photography, Harold Feinstein was enlisted for the Korean War in 1952. On his return, he settled at the Jazz Loft, designed record sleeves for the Blue Note and Signal record labels and met W. Eugene Smith, with whom he collaborated on the Pittsburgh Project.

Harold Feinstein’s body of work stretches over six decades, focusing on Coney Island, portraying a diverse, people-centred and joyful America. He also taught – notably in the Annenberg School for Communication in Philadelphia. His pedagogy and philosophy, in the service of artistic vision rather than technique, left its mark on a generation.

His photographs are held in prestigious private collections and the collections of major American museums (MoMA, International Center of Photography, New York City Museum, The Jewish Museum, etc.).

© Harold Feinstein
Viva Puerto Rico
1978
Harold Feinstein Photography Trust, CI-049