Au Musée de la photographie de Budapest, dans le cadre du colloque sur la photographie hongroise, je présenterai l’exposition “Ergy Landau à livres ouverts”
“Ergy Landau (1896-1967) was a founding member of the Rapho photographic agency, but is little known today. She was part of the Hungarian diaspora which included some of the most significant figures of photography in the 20th century (André Kertesz and László Moholy-Nagy, to name but two). Rubbing shoulders with Brassaï, close to Nora Dumas and Ylla, Landau was part of a generation of femaleartists who made a mark on the history of photography and its relationship with the world of print.
Ergy Landau à livres ouverts (an open book): the title clearly indicates our bias. This exhibition emphasises a mode of distribution of photographs that is too often minimised by exhibitions about photographers, despite the fact that the print media –such as journals, magazines, books – are of course amongst the primary vectors of circulating photographs.
Sourced from the personal archives of the photographer, as well as the main publications to which Ergy Landau contributed, this exhibition reveals various facets of her relation with literature, in particular books and print publications.
Whether it be illustrating magazine articles, designing children’s books, contributing to ‘portraits de pays’ or photographing writers, a major proportion of this photographer’s work emerges from a dialogue with writers’ texts. Ergy Landau- an open book aims to help people rediscover this oeuvre by documenting and displaying this important aspect of her work”.
