Photo Trouvée
September 19-September 26, 2018
Pingyao International Photography Festival, Pingyao, Shanxi, Peoples Republic of China

Participating artists: Anne-France Abillon, Elaine Duigenan, Meggan Gould, Lorena Guillen-Vaschetti, Juergen Koenigs, Kent Rogowski, Sarah Strassmann

Photo Trouvé
The truth about the flat object in photography
1822: Niecephore Niepce the inventor of photography and competitor to Louis Daguerre, took an image of a table with glass bottles, which we know as the very first still-life in the history of photography. Still-life paintings always have been important in the history of Fine Art and single objects in paintings were filled with an aura and often iconological.
When Marcel Duchamp invented the objet trouvé with the cicle`s wheel in 1913 or the fountain of 1917 the object itself became the ready-made. Picassos bull, made from a saddle and handlebars, shows that from the beginning of the 20th   century on we were able to accept the object itself as an artistic expression, or we were able to see it as something else at the same time.
Karl Blossfeld also beginning of the 20th century searched for our natural expressions in nature. He created a timeless series of forms that he found in plants. Almost at the same time Paul Cézanne painted his famous still-lifes of apples, oranges and later peaches. In his paintings color and form of the brush became as important as the painted object and the painting of the object became a representation of itself.
Nowadays we are surrounded by billions of man-made objects. Food, genetic converted plants, industrial products, monumental machines and all waste is present all around and circling in clouds around our planet. The artists in this exhibition work based on this knowledge between the photographed object, seen through the viewfinder like through the renaissance-like window, up to the objet trouvé, where the photo itself becomes the photo trouvé. The only thing that remains is the question what the object on the wall still means.