Agnès Varda (Brussels, Belgium, 1928 – Paris, France, 2019) will live forever in the eyes, thoughts and hearts of those who have the chance to come across her images, whether her films, for which she was celebrated around the world, or her photographs, for which this exhibition offers a selection created especially for its presentation in Brazil.
Varda’s photography is far less well known than her cinema. She was not much concerned with showing it. She regarded the photographs as “old things” that she had no time to revisit, driven by the urgency of using her last years to add new works to the great many she had already made. Yet it was precisely with photography that she began her work and her life as an artist. In the late 1940s, she met Jean Vilar, who chose her as the photographer for the first ten years of the Avignon Theatre Festival, as well as the official photographer of the Théâtre National Populaire, both founded by him. She worked as a stage photographer, an activity this exhibition presents through a few photographs she took of a play staged by Les Griots, the first Black theatre company in Paris. Then came cinema and, later, a singular form of contemporary art that she practiced above all in video installations, for which she brought her extraordinary empathy for people, in that art of storytelling that we feel in every image she recorded and invented throughout her life.
The exhibition follows Agnès’s travels and her wandering through a certain working-class Paris, through southern Europe, then poor and forgotten, and through revolutions and uprisings around the world to which she added her gaze and expressed her solidarity: China, Cuba, the struggle of the Black Panthers in the United States, and the lives of women and children in the most varied latitudes, to whom she always devoted special attention. It presents Agnès’s movement from photography to cinema and from cinema back to photography, to which she returned in her later years, in an exercise of reflection on the nature and condition of the experiences that her close, solidary images make it possible to record.
Photographie AGNÈS VARDA Cinéma joins a first name and a surname, but it also crosses two techniques on which the artist never stopped reflecting, in their reciprocal influence, until the end of her days. May everyone who visits this exhibition leave moved by the emotion that led so many people, at the end of her films, in encounters with Agnès, or when visiting her exhibitions, to feel that their lives had become more sensitive to others and to the world, giving rise to the desire to proclaim “Viva Varda!”
Rosalie Varda
João Fernandes
curators
https://iberecamargo.org.br/exposicao/fotografia-agnes-varda-cinema/
