Album

Exhibition Album
Art au centre #7 – Liège (Belgium)

07 October – 31 December 2021

Invented in the first half of the 19th century, photography was for a long time confined to the portraitist’s studio, where the wealthy classes came to maintain their dynastic fiber. At that time, grasping family identity seemed to be at the heart of concerns when parents, father and mother, settled on either side of the image and framed their offspring. It’s about capturing a specific moment when the family “looks like this”, crystallizes in the vast time of history, before the children grow up and the parents get older. According to his tastes, his means, his vision of things, his social class, docile body was inscribed in a collective history. No family without a family photo.

Thus, in its early days, family photography remained conventional. But since the end of the 1960s, she has experienced profound changes such as the mutations of the family she immortalizes, but also with the technical evolutions of the medium. 

For Art au centre #7, Amélie Berrodier probes this practice and its evolution with the video installation Album. Between classical poses, old background and new socio-cultural habits, the artist mixes the historical and contemporary codes related to the practice of portraiture. But more particularly, it’s a question of highlighting the family ties specific to each composition, as well as the gap between the pose initially adopted for photography and the behaviors – laughter, embraces, distances – that the long time of the video generates. 

While these photographs are usually frozen, they come alive here by extending the time of the shot, as if to defy the death of a represented moment.