‘Too original for a single half’: the photographs of Paris of Agnès Varda go on display | Agnès Varda
THe the French director Agnès Varda, who died in 2019 At the age of 90, he had many lives. Initially a photographer broke through as a director with Cléo from 5 to 7 In 1962, and then he reinvented himself in the late 1970s with artistic installations that made a tour of the most prestigious contemporary exhibition spaces in the world, from the Venice Biennale at the Los Angeles Museum. His latest cinematographic documentaries such as autobiographical Agnès beaches (2008) e Faces, villages (2017) have collected prizes all over the world.
Elf -looking range with his eternal short bob and the melodious soft voice showed a formidable determination through his life, which was imposed in the world of a man. Today Varda is a French monument. So much so that his work is now exhibited for the first time in one of the most iconic and historical museums in Paris, the Carnavalet Museumdedicated to the history of the French capital.
The Paris of Agnès Varda, here and there, which has just opened, focuses on its first profession, that of the “artisan photographer”. This small but perfectly formed exhibition is for the first time the first photographic work of Varda and invites the viewer in his Parisian house, a temple for art and friendship.
For Varda, photography and Paris they were intimately linked. Perhaps because he never left the impasse to 86 rue daguresre near Montparnasse, where he lived for almost 70 years. Made with two abandoned shops united by an alley of the courtyard, Varda transformed this islet of a place in a study, a playground and a house where customers, family, friends, companions and lovers constantly cross. At the first visit in the place in 1951, his father asked her if he really wanted to live and work in this barn with only a swim in the courtyard. She replied: “I will make it work in some way.” And she did it.
His Greek father and the French mother had fled from the German invasion in June 1940 and settled with their five children in the seaside resort of Sète to Linguadoc. After Germany has occupied everything France At the end of 1942, the family moved to Paris. No more southern light and heat: “Paris was cold and sad. The Germans were everywhere,” he recalled. However, since Paris was freed in August 1944, a new spirit, a freedom and a non -adulterated joy, galvanized the whole country and in particular his youth. The sixteen year old Varda entered the Louvre Art School and chose to become a photographer. He also legally changed his name in an act of emancipation: Born Arlette, he chose to be known as Agnès.
Officially recorded with the guild of photographers at the age of 18, he lived for the first time in Montmartre with his lover, the sculptor Valentine Schlegel, who became one of his first models. The two young women then moved to 86 rue daguerre in the 14th arrondissement, after Agnès’ father agreed to help him buy these strange boutiques interconnected in ruins.
Through Valentine, Varda met the theater director Maverick Jean Vilar. This meeting pushed Varda to the world of Avant Garde Theater and films. Vilar, who was the brother -in -law of Valentine’s Day, was the theatrical director of France whose productions of classics such as the Cids of Corneille with the Rubacuori Gérard Philippe in the role of the title attracted the crowd. Vilar believed in the popular theater and, thanks to a deliberate policy of tickets at affordable prices, brought the magic of the classics in an audience of the working class. Served by the most talented young actors of the Paris dramatic school known as the Conservatory, Vilar believed that the working class deserved the best; It was a perfect French case of elitism for everyone and it worked. Varda became the official photographer of Vilar, taking portraits of all the actors and documenting the evidence and life of the theater company, in Paris and on tour.
Next to his professional work, Varda has developed his style, inspired by surrealism. In one of his personal works, he superimposed two negatives, one of the Senna river, another of the sculpted profile of a man, thus creating a strange and disturbing composition called The Droned Man. He would have cultivated this strangely otherness throughout his life. In his “studio studio” as he called him, he started receiving many young actors looking for a new type of professional portrait, in natural light, far from the old effects in the studio of light and shadows, sophisticated poses and makeup.
This thirst for spontaneity, naturalness and improvisation permeated all the arts in the 1950s. In photography, his colleague Sabine Weiss, but also Willy Ronis and Robert Doisneau, have left their mark on their ability to capture life and people in motion. Varda, although not a member of an agency of photographers like Magnum, shared the same passion for people and freedom. Unlike photographic journalists who have carried out assignments anywhere in the world, Varda has mostly photographed Parisian or visiting artists. In 1954, he dragged Federico Fellini, in Paris to promote his film La Strada, in a demolition site near her, and took photos of him, a half hidden in the trenches of stone debris. He didn’t seem to import him. “He was calm, smiling and patient,” he recalled. He also had the American artist and sculptor Alexander Calder Crossing the road in front of his study throughout the afternoon bringing his huge cell phones while laughing.
News magazines have started commissioning his work. He managed to impose both his stories and his vision, for example when he followed a girl who had dressed as angel on the streets of Paris, capturing people’s reactions, half surgery, half suspicious. He used Paris as furniture and sometimes as a character. At the time, the city was dark, its buildings covered with centuries -old dirt and soot and its people, mostly, of modest origin. In 1957, Varda chose to document the life of Rue Mouffetard in the 5th arrondissement, one of the oldest roads in Paris, which meant from Pantheon. Its inhabitants were mostly poor or hardening, they lived on the margins of society. Varda fired in the foreground of their faces, their eyes tell dramatic stories if not simply sad.
Her photography inevitably led her to the cinema which, in the mid -1950s, was on a crossroads. His first long films, the Pointe Courte, was shot in himself in the summer of 1954, with a reduced budget, thanks to the generosity of friends like Alain Resnais, who edited the film for her and the actors of Vilar Philippe Noiret and Sylvia Monfort, who worked for free. Four years before the official birth of the French New Wave, the Pointe Courte announced the changes to come, even if very few the credits for this. When her new partner, director Jacques Demy, moved with her to 86 rue Daguerre in 1959, the films and photography became the two most important things of her life, together with her daughter Rosalie, born in 1958.
Varda was always too original and too curious for life to choose only a means in which to express yourself. His notebooks, letters, news, extracts of his films and videos at home, and his photography demonstrate his irresistible enthusiasm for all eccentric and wonderful things. While he said it alone: ”I like to go here and there. I like to say one thing and it is opposite. I feel less trapped in that way, because I don’t choose only a version of life”.
