From her first works, dating from the early 2000s, Isabelle Le Minh has assembled an œuvre which investigates the new perspectives arising from the decline of analogue photography and our transition into the digital age. The English word “digital,” adopted with some reserve by other languages, has an etymology (the Latin word for finger) that could permit one to use it as its own antonym. From the practice of counting with fingers, it comes to mean number and, in this sense of numerical, digital was adopted in computer jargon. The word thus paradoxically puts the finger (the index ?) and, by synecdoche, the hand back in the picture – in a photographic practice from which, as we thought we were saying, the handicraft is supposed to have disappeared.
This exhibition picks up the thread of Isabelle Le Minh’s work with a piece from her iconic series Digitométries (2015) – also being presented in the exhibition "Épreuves de la matière" at the BnF (National Library of France). Long interested in how certain landmarks from the history of photography persist in our visual culture, Le Minh has been exploring for several years now another aspect of the medium’s legacy: the memory of its industrial past. Much as it would like to, Kodak’s famous slogan "You press the button, we do the rest" never entirely succeeded in obfuscating the immense technological and human resources invested upstream and in the wings of photographic practice: research and development, the conception of prototypes, the manufacture and commercialization of cameras – in a word all the people engaged in the camera industry: scientists, engineers, administrators, and factory workers; brains and skilled hands executing in concert the complex score comprised by the technological history of photography.
In 2019, Le Minh devoted a series, Traumachromes,to the city of Rochester, the cradle of George Eastman’s Kodak firm. Her urban views, made using the legendary film Tri-X, show us a city left to molder in consequence of the gradual abandonment of the industry of silver-gelatin photography. Haunting the disused buildings and deserted arteries, one can just imagine the city’s formerly bustling life – crowds of men and women entering and exiting the factories. Their spirits, ghost-like, seem to creep back in via the layers of color and irregular streaks traversing the images. These irregularities, caused in fact by a malfunction that occurred in the process of digitalizing the negatives, appear to be the work of an avenging or mischievous phantom.
The industrial history of photography was not, however, written exclusively in Rochester. A few decades earlier, at the height of the Cold War, an economic duel between the GDR and Japan was played out – one which ultimately led to the eclipse of the East German camera industry. Behind the Iron Wall – specifically in Dresden, where the pentaprism and the reflex-view-finder were invented – the firm Pentacon, the entity issuing from a reorganization of several German brands in 1945, developed a line of cameras of which the Praktica was to become the most iconic. Despite all its efforts, this flagship of East-German industrial prowess failed to successfully navigate the transition to electronic components. Thus, in the 1970s, the company was supplanted by its Japanese competitors, who came to dominate the market through their introduction of microcircuits into camera mechanics. Guardians of Pentacon’s glorious past, the Dresden Museum of Science and Technology today houses a vast collection of cameras, prototypes and technical documents, but also of materials in electronic form and various records of the company’s internal life and promotional activities. For two years, Le Minh made of this archive a stomping-ground for her own research and experimentation; taking the Museum’s multi-faceted collection as her starting point, she created a series of objects that pay no heed to the accepted boundaries of the photographic medium and present daring hybrids of the still image and the mechanical device, of proto-cinema (mutoscopes) and sound. In quasi-sculptural compositions, which unfold majestically on the wall, she points up correspondences between assembly diagrams and the topography of wafers, those silicon disks engraved for use in integrated circuits, which she glorifies as a poetic abstraction (Feedbackloop). One installation takes the form of an enigmatic glyptotheque populated with cameras that have been captured by a 3D scanner and reproduced in plaster (Stase or Stasis): once again, a crowd of phantoms which, from their museum shelves, dart glances at us through their blind lenses.
Two other works complete this new panel in the œuvre of Le Minh and create a musical echo with the exhibition title. Routine, which the artist produced using artefacts of perforated cardboard for barrel organs, recalls the earliest perforated cards for mechanical musical instruments – a precursor to the binary language of information technology. These dumb substrates, which are nonetheless repositories of a music "in negative", are like an acoustical pendant to photographic paper, harboring the latent image. They also resonate with Les Miroirs qui se souviennent (Mirrors that Remember), a work that Le Minh created in 2019, inspired by the music rolls for pianola collected by George Eastman. Bequemlichkeitsgrad (Degree of Comfort) presents a variation on the theme of the musical score and the keyboard: here, an elegant pair of women’s hands appear to execute a subtle ergonomic étude.
These groupings of objects produce a dizzying web of leaps in time and aesthetic ramifications: they juxtapose the avant-garde artist László Moholy-Nagy with models posing for an advertisement; transform business managers into hypothetical heroes of a spy film (Rideau); make us hear the hectic, clicking and clacking soundtrack of factory work, while reenacting the absurd rituals of corporate ceremony that punctuate the social life of employees (Raw Loop); deconstruct the camera mechanism to lay bare its sophisticated engineering (Planning). All these works make reference to the fantasies and inventions which mark the history of photography – a history inherently technological which, far from being hermetic, becomes in the hands of Le Minh an inexhaustible trove of surprises and replays.
Text by Sonia Voss, for the exhibition "Postlude" by Isabelle Le Minh at Galerie Christophe Gaillard, November 2023.
