SYSTEMATICALLY OPEN? — New Forms for Contemporary Image Production explores new structures for the presentation of the photographic image. An examination of the relationships between photography and its various modes of display, the exhibition provides a new framework for experiencing the image as a reproduction, and prompts a rethinking of the photographic medium.

The LUMA Arles Core Group invited four artists—Walead Beshty, Elad Lassry, Zanele Muholi, and Collier Schorr—to each develop a curatorial project for this inaugural exhibition at the recently refurbished La Mécanique Générale.

Curated by Walead Beshty, Picture Industry draws together diverse artworks and objects from the 1880s to the present. The exhibition includes an array of images whose formats reveal the complex and evolving relationship between the photographic medium and its many modes of distribution.

For his Untitled contribution, Elad Lassry implicitly asks, ‘What kinds of engagements are possible with pictures?’ Lassry’s project, a series of photographs depicting dental procedures and extreme close-up images of teeth and gums, addresses a paradox that has attenuated our relationship to medical imagery. Once such images are apprehended outside of their mechanical or clinical context, their original visual qualities seem to shift.

Somnyama Ngonyama is an ongoing project by photographer and activist Zanele Muholi. While her earlier projects have depicted members of the black LGBTI community of South Africa, Somnyama Ngonyama finds the artist turning the camera on herself. Self-portraiture is used as a tool of intimacy, serving as commentary on contemporary political and cultural issues that affect black people in Africa and its diaspora.

A collaborative dialogue between Collier Schorr and Anne Collier, Shutters, Frames, Collections, Repetition consists of portraits, nudes, and studies whose exposed subjects are frequently framed by the formats of the medium itself. ‘In photography,’ Schorr notes, ‘there is always the presence of the echo: shutters, frames, collections, repetition. The photographic body […] is gazed at, gazes back, enjoys being the scene.’ A near-doubling of names that complicates the simple reading of the project, the exhibition asserts that Schorr and Collier see themselves when they read about the other.

For this project, the architect Philippe Rahm produced Luminance, a design concept that unites the four projects of the exhibition, while reinforcing LUMA’s emphasis on sustainable design and architecture.