Shadow Collection: Gregory Halpern and the Birthplace of Photography
Inspired by early color images of France from the Magnum archive, Gregory Halpern explores perception and obscuration at the house of Nicéphore Niépce
This summer, as part of “A World in Color,” an ongoing project between Magnum, Fujifilm and MPP to start digitizing the 650,000 color slides from the Magnum archive in Paris, Gregory Halpern was given carte blanche to curate a selection of images made by Magnum photographers in France over the second half of the 20th century.
Halpern was immediately drawn to reflexive images, ones that gently nod to how we perceive the world, both as subject and spectator, and the role of photography itself. Curating a selection of 10 images, Halpern then set out to shoot his own series in response, using a Fujifilm GFX100 II, and starting where photography began — inside the home of Nicéphore Niépce, French inventor and pioneer of the early photograph.
Gregory Halpern: This project began with a deep dive into the Magnum color archives of France. I found myself drawn not only to the vast content of the archive, but to the ways in which it echoed my own visual preoccupations, particularly images that were reflexive in nature—images that not only depicted something, but that seemed to reflect on the act of seeing itself. The images I kept coming back to were the ones that addressed perception and obscuration in equal measure. In their ambiguity, these images seemed to echo the camera’s dual power: to reveal and to withhold, to clarify and to confuse.
As part of this commission, I was also asked to make a new series of photographs in response to the archived images. I didn’t know how this series would end, but I knew I wanted it to start where photography began: inside the home of Nicéphore Niépce.
"I spent two days alone in the house, and for much of that time, I found myself opening and closing the shutters to adjust the light entering the room."
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In 1824, Niépce made a hazy representation (an eight-hour exposure) of a view out his window. I wanted to spend time at that window, thinking about the original desire to “fix an image” and the birth of an idea that would shape the modern imagination. I spent two days alone in the house, and for much of that time, I found myself opening and closing the shutters to adjust the light entering the rooms. In those quiet moments, I began to imagine Niépce’s window as the first viewfinder, and the house itself as a vast, early camera.
"I began to imagine Niépce’s window as the first viewfinder, and the house itself as a vast, early camera."
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"Photographs, in the end, perform a quiet alchemy, turning time into object, a transformation just this side of the supernatural."
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200 years after Niépce’s invention, the longing to hold time in our hands remains a mysterious compulsion, a desire so powerful it precedes language and defies logic. We understand the mechanisms of photography—shutter, sensor, file—but there remains something uncanny about what photographs do, and how we use them. They respond to deep human desires: to remember, to possess, to comprehend. They collapse time, allowing us to look into moments we didn’t live, to re-enter ones we did, and to find order in what otherwise unravels.
The series Shadow Collection, alongside the unseen archive images that inspired it, is on view at the Galerie Arena (16 rue des Arènes) in Arles until August 30.
Discover more from“A World in Color” here.
