Exhibition: "Public photography The Sixties"

Description

03.06 - 02.10.2022 Tuesday - Sunday,

10:00 - 20:00 h

Plant 4

Free entrance

Twenty years ago, the exhibition Public Photography presented at the MNCARS a selection of magazines, posters and books published in the interwar years. Instead of framed copies of limited edition and handcrafted developing, there were now inkjet images. In this way, Public Photography showed that the place of the photos is not on the wall, but on the page. Something difficult for the art market, academia and museums, but obvious to the public and photographers.

Today more than ever, when photobooks are the main means of communication for photographers and photos live on both old and new pages of plasma screens. In Public Photography there were people, information and news, political propaganda and commercial advertising, adventures and travel, everyday experiences, streets, goods and work, eroticism, fashion and customs, cities and landscapes, nature and science of the twenties and thirties, when everything visible was photographed and published for a huge audience, both in number (practically everyone) and in curiosity.

The explosion of photography multiplied during the 1960s, a time more conducive to mass culture than to high culture. The prevalence of magazines, propaganda and advertising has never been higher. Photojournalism is a bestseller that can generate public opinion on issues such as the Vietnam War. Politics is now airing in magazines and posters. Everything is sold with photos. Publishers publish a large number of photobooks, including masterpieces by Richard Avedon, Eikoh Hosoe, Kikuji Kawada, William Klein, Irving Penn, Shomei Tomatsu and Ed van der Elsken. Artists find photography. Both Andy Warhol's Pop Art and Gerhard Richter's Kapitalistischer Realismus use photos. It's the time of pop music, distributed on discs with photo covers.

The faces of music stars and other mass idols star in the fashion of posters, which sneak into homes without leaving the streets, crowded with movie posters, political propaganda and concert announcements, some as bright as those of the psychedelic scene. Californian. Everything, everything that happens on a planetary scale is in the printed photos. From colonial wars, revolts against racial segregation and the fight for civil rights to the assassinations of Kennedy, Luther King or Che Guevara. From Beatlemania and Swinging London to hippie communes, sexual liberation, free love, feminism, Woodstock and Monterrey, street life or artificial paradises.

The sixties are the last optimistic moment of the last century, a time capable of living up to date and proposing utopias that photographic publications tell and show in every detail. A hilarious fiction and a stimulating journey that includes both the barricades of May 1968 and the Russian tanks in Prague as well as the lunar promenade and lysergic acid. An exhibition curated by Horacio Fernández.

Details