exhibition stéphane lallemand

museum of modern and contempory art of strasbourg

february 3 > april 4 2004

Photogénies...

photogenics drawings

The models of the photogenic drawings are erotic photographs that were published as postcards or in books that are nowadays distributed on a large-scale. That way, the statute of these images that won their authors an imprisonment punishment for “obscenity” and for “undermining of good morals” and that were discretely circulating among a clientele of amateurs, have changed by transforming themselves into icons of a so-called moral freedom. Today, they are proposed on the shelves of bookshops, leaving the hell where they were being confined and where they have been replaced by the actual products of the pornographic industry.
The models are reproduced in large size with the traditional technique of drawing with graphite, on a corrugated cardboard With the pressure of the pencil, the mark makes appear the structure of the corrugated cardboard, recalling a video image (hold frame). The questions concerning the relation with the image, the technique, the virtuosity, the appropriation and the diffusion remain in an approach that continues the one that has been developed in the work with the “télécrans”.