21 juin • 21 septembre 2019
Louis Jammes presents from June 21 to September 21 in the Gallery and Showroom unpublished historical and recent photographs, from his collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat in the late 1980s to images made in Tbilisi, Georgia in 2019.
Louis Jammes was born in 1958 in Carcassonne. At the beginning of the 1980s, at the beginning of his career, he immortalized the artists in his personal pantheon, those who inspired his career, such as the members of the Beat Generation, Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, then his relatives, the emerging free figuration and those of his generation: Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Combas, Julian Schnabel, in a setting that he conceived evoking their work. Louis Jammes gradually seeks to explore the world through his lens, to capture the present time. He went out into the street and took portraits of “Bag people” in Barbès in 1987, anonymous people posing in front of a painted background, whom he thus turned into heroes for the duration of a photo session. He then travels to countries where major events in contemporary history are taking place, in the field of great reporters, in cities and countries that are suffering or at war. In search of human nature. In Gaza and the West Bank in 1988, in Tunisia with the Palestinians, in Spain with the Gypsies and in Berlin when the wall came down in 1989, in Chernobyl in 1991 following the nuclear power plant disaster, in Sarajevo during the 1993 war, in Chechnya and Africa in 1996, in the Taimyr peninsula in Northern Siberia in 1999, in Iraq on the day of the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, in Egypt, Tahrir Square during the revolution in 2012, in the heart of Europe in 2015 with refugees. Louis Jammes does not photograph barbarism in its acts, but victims. He does not wish to bear witness to these conflicts in the manner of a reporter, but to take sides, to be part of them.
