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PIERRE LEGUILLON FEATURES DIANE ARBUS: A PRINTED RETROSPECTIVE 1960-1971 & CADY NOLAND: THE AMERICAN DREAM
DE HALLEN, HAARLEM, THE NETHERLANDS
DECEMBER 18, 2010 - MARCH I3, 2011
In 1961, one year after Diane Arbus declared authorial independence from her husband, Allan, and five years after the birth of Cady Noland, Roland Barthes posited that "The press photograph is a message."1 As pioneered by Arbus and later appropriated by Noland, the role of the press photograph expanded in a post-war America that was understanding and exporting itself through images.
In The Photographic Alessage (19 61), Barthes considered the press photograph as formed by three factors: a source of emission, a channel of transmission and a point of reception. "As for the channel of transmission, this is the newspaper itself, or, more precisely, a complex of concurrent messages with the photograph as center and surrounds constituted by the text, the title, the caption, the layout...."2
Concurrent solo exhibitions at De Hallen surveying the practices of Arbus and Noland presented two distinct strategies of intervention within the channel of transmission, asserting the ongoing role of the press photograph as catalyst for both exhibition and objectmaking. Artist Pierre Leguillon presented not only the lesser known published press photographs of Diane Arbus, but also insisted upon a re-reading determined by a return to the texts that accompanied them. Cady Noland reframes the press photographs she appropriates through the materiality of the image itself, transferred by silkscreen from source to surface.
Circulated by the Paris-based Kadist Art Foundation, Pierre Leguillon's "printed retrospective" of Diane Arbus presents a survey of her press photographs from i960 until her suicide in 1971. The results unravel the idea of Arbus in the collective imagination, as circulated in popular imagery : the photographer of dwarves and...