The Pierre Cordier year

HackelBury, the prestigious London gallery, has mounted a major and very timely exhibit of Pierre Cordier's work, overlapping with but not eclipsing the still-running V&A show, and not to be confused with the HackelBury booths at the AIPAD and Armory shows in New York at which we are promised still more Cordiers.

Cordier, egggram 1/6/65 I, 1965

This is the year for Pierre Cordier - and for chemigrams.  It's been a long time coming.

Cordier, chemigram 29/11/76 Mineral vegetable animal, detail, 1976

In a moment now legendary, Cordier hit upon the chemigram method one day in 1956.  Well - that's his story and it makes good copy.  But just as Newton stood on the shoulders of giants, so did Cordier have his antecedents, Teske, Kesting, Tabard, Chargesheimer, others.  Fox Talbot, in the opening pages of The Pencil of Nature, recalls his startling experience of stumbling upon color in silver salts in the year 1838 ("I discovered a remarkable fact of quite a new kind").  Cordier's insight, however, was to see what no one else saw: that photography is not just about looking and recording - he had done a bit of this himself in his early twenties, so he knew - but about evoking and extracting imagery that is essentially trapped, as a capacity inherent in material, within the physical and chemical confines of the very stuff of his art, the silver halide emulsion.  For him the artistic enterprise is always a dialog with the bruteness of matter.  That's where it starts and ends.

Cordier, chemigram 22/6/87, detail, 1987

He has spent a lifetime thinking about how to make a photograph from the inside out.

Cordier, chemigram 6/11/62, 1962

Cordier, chemigram 15/8/63 I, 1963

In the HackelBury Gallery, we are fortunate to have gallerists sensitive to the stunning beauty of these works.  I withhold my preferences: there is altogether too much wealth here.  Let it simply be said that the inspired, grueling labor that went into 'Mineral vegetable animal' (1976) will likely never be repeated.

Cordier, 15/8/59 III, 1959

How can we begin to learn from his work, his methods?  One way is through his writings.  His great monograph, Le chimigramme/the chemigram is the place to start; because of the 'Shadow Catchers' show, it's available at the V&A Museum shop in London and they'll ship anywhere in the world.  There's also Martin Barnes' catalog for the V&A, with an important chapter on Cordier, and finally, for those still needful, the in-depth interview with Cordier in the upcoming March-April issue of Photo Technique magazine.

In future posts we intend to examine aspects of the Cordier oeuvre, with some of the grit and the how-to, for the benefit of practitioners.  The lesson plan says to start by seeing this show.  It runs till March 31.

Groundbreaking show at the V&A

Pierre Cordier, Chemigram 25/1/66 V, 1966

Adam Fuss, from the series My Ghost, 1999

Garry Fabian Miller, Year One: Ogronios, 2005-2006

The handsomely-installed cameraless show 'Shadow Catchers', at the Victoria & Albert Museum, has opened its doors at last, and all London was on hand to welcome it, with more than 500 revelers, artists, collectors, gallerists, and hangers-on. Only Fox Talbot was missing - well, I didn't see Anna Atkins either, but the spirit of both hovered over the festivities. Parties lasted well into the evening as the lights flickered out over South Kensington.

at the reception, October 12

Later in the week, the New Scientist began their lede with curator Martin Barnes' rhetorical question: what trajectory might photography have taken if it hadn't become obsessed with the camera and the lens? That we've had to wait 150 years to ask this, with the world careening madly in another direction, is testimony both to the stubbornness of tradition and the boldness of his courage, but it is implicit in the thoughts of the author of The Pencil of Nature, who sensed photography's dilemma when he wrote, "the phenomenon appears to me to partake of the character of the marvelous." Marvelous indeed: Pierre Cordier, Susan Derges, Adam Fuss, Garry Fabian Miller, and Floris Neusüss all demonstrate the richness of an alternate, hidden tradition of artists whose work is a meditation on photographic materials and process, reclaiming the visionary from the prosaic and documentary.

Let us hope this landmark exhibit, which runs until February 20, 2011, will be followed by others. Meanwhile, in another wing, the museum has mounted a parallel show called 'A History of Cameraless Photography', with a selection of gems from their vast collection: Man Ray, Anna Atkins, Moholy-Nagy and others. You'll be overwhelmed by Shadow Catchers, but don't miss this one on the way out.

Pierre Cordier and Martin Barnes on Cromwell Road