Family/Family exhibition at Le Château d’Eau
The Château d’Eau presents Family/Family an exhibition bringing together the work of Ed Alcock / Arja Hyytiäinen / Ilka Kramer / Julien Magre.
The four artists united around the title Family, Family, are from four European countries, all photographing the private and using the family as their field of research. However, far from the family album, which outlines the important moments in life, they shine a light on the minor details in the everyday, thus rendering these supposedly private images universal. The I becomes we and everyone, in the same way as Katherine Mansfield, shows with delicacy and subtlety the modest side of existence.
Firelight
Playing
in the fire and twilight together,
My little son and I,
Suddenly--woefully--I
stoop to catch him.
«Try, mother, try!»
Old
Nurse Silence lifts a silent finger:
«Hush! cease your play!»
What happened? What in that tiny moment
Flew away?
Katherine Mansfield
Ed Alcock, Hobbledehoy
Ed Alcock is a British photographer living in Paris.
‘My father used to call me a hobbledehoy. He had a rhyme that he used to half-sing-half-speak, “he was neither man, nor boy; he was but a hobbledehoy”. The word has been used in our family for generations, and has its origin in Old English. It usually describes a male child in that awkward phase between childhood and manhood.
There is something in the way my son holds himself in these photographs, and in the forlorn nature of his gaze that makes me think of an older child, already nostalgic for his childhood. Of course, I’m projecting my own feelings about that period. So who is this hobbledehoy : my son, myself or both of us? Ed Alcock
Arja Hyytiäinen
Finish, born 1974. Represented by Galerie Vu Paris.
‘I want to document the fragments, the inner visions. Images that haunt and save. Hands carrying fava beans as corpses. An image as a whisper. Timelessness as the measure. Fictional and self experienced.’ Extract from Cahier N°1
www.agencevu.com/photographers/photographer.php?id=162
Ilka Kramer, Behind the House
Ilka Kramer was born 1969 in Germany, She lives and works in Switzerland
Behind the house shows children in their approach to nature, according to their imagination and fascination of fairytales. Behind the house, far away from the life of adults, the garden and the fields become large spaces to explore. In timeless moments, the children get taken away in their own stories, facing nature which is full of beauty and generosity, but also hostility and permanent transformation. All are staged photographies, inspired by the observation of the children and the souvenirs of my own childhood.
Julien Magre, Elles veulent déjà s’enfuir (They already want to run away)
‘They already want to run away, everything is in this literary title, setting the scene of a story which is taking place. The photographer, stands apart, watching the characters who populate his private life, this so enigmatic elles (the feminine ‘they’ in French) leads us into a story filled with feminine diversity.’ Léa Bismuth