Un monde non-objectif en photographie at Galerie Thessa Herold

Michel Poivert, professor of photography history at the Sorbonne and president of the Société française de photographie, curated an exhibition at Galerie Thessa Herold in Paris in autumn 2003, alongside Estelle Ditta. Titled 'Un monde non-objectif en photographie,' the show featured works by 47 artists alongside scientific photographs, tracing over a century of experimental photography—practices that reject the indexical function of the medium toward abstraction. Poivert highlights key moments: the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen in 1896, spiritualist experiments, Surrealist interests in lightning and sparks, and techniques like Rayograms (Man Ray), Schadographies (Christian Schad), photograms (László Moholy-Nagy), materialiographies (Jean-Pierre Sudre), and chimigrams (Pierre Cordier, 1960s). The dense, 19th-century-style hang juxtaposes motifs of liquids, corals, lightning, nebulae, crystals, and motion traces. The exhibition includes contemporary works by Raoul Ubac, François Rouan, Peter Keetman, Joan Fontcuberta, Vik Muniz, Béatrice Helg, and Yveline Loiseur, demonstrating ongoing formal kinship. A comprehensive catalogue accompanies the show, which Richard Leydier of artpress calls one of the finest historical photography exhibitions in recent years, remarkable for its museum quality in a private gallery.