Magazines - Tribal Art Winter 2009

By Bérénice Geoffroy-Schneiter

Introduction
Yves Le Fur’s genius for concocting exhibitions with a fascinatingly experimental approach is well known. The second installment of Photoquai, the biennial exhibition of photographic images from around the world organized by the Musée du Quai Branly, was a playful visual stroll that was recently on view in the Pavillon des Sessions of the Musée du Louvre. The concept was simple: a series of photographic portraits from the Quai Branly’s collection were shown in juxtaposition with the masterpieces of tribal art at the Louvre, which were selected for display there by the infallible eye of Jacques Kerchache. This presentation of the images taken by travelers, anonymous individuals, and ethnologists (including Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Soustelle), as well as by famous photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Pierre Verger, in no way reduced them to the status of mere ethnological documents. On the contrary, they drew the eye and created a hitherto unperceived dialogue between themselves and the iconic objects that surround them, which they also echoed. “It’s more of a punctuation than an exhibition,” stated Christine Barthe, head of the photography collection at the Quai Branly, who assisted Le Fur in the careful process of selecting and presenting these works. In one area, a Dogon maternity stood next to a nineteenth-century photo of an Indian woman with her child, taken by geographer and botanist Roland Bonaparte. In another, a New Guinea korwar figure was in close proximity to a graceful portrait taken by French photographer Georges Geo-Fourrier in the 1930s. It shows a young African woman with her face turned away, mirroring the ancestral sculpture as a true “metaphor of destiny,” in Le Fur’s words.