Galerie Claude Lemand

PHOTOS AND VIDEOS OF THE CLAUDE AND FRANCE LEMAND DONATION.

www.imarabe.org
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 Halida BOUGHRIET
 Bissane AL CHARIF
 DAHMANE
 Randa MADDAH
 Steve SABELLA
 François SARGOLOGO
 Nassouh ZAGHLOULEH
 Ridha ZILI
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Claude Lemand. The story of a young col­lec­tion

Gallerist and col­lector, I was not sen­si­tive to pho­tog­raphy as a work of art, I tended to con­sider it as a par­tic­ular kind of print, too fragile, ... although I was very attracted by the his­tory of pho­tog­raphy in the 19th cen­tury and through the research of cer­tain big names of the 20th cen­tury and those of con­tem­po­rary artists, who knew how to create a real world of their own, orig­inal, like real cre­ative "artists".

Dahmane’s works, his por­traits as well as his breath­taking pho­tomon­tages, con­vinced me that I was in the pres­ence of a real artist pho­tog­ra­pher. Adept of tech­nical per­fec­tion and pos­sessed, from his ado­les­cence and his first steps in this art, by the rich and mul­tiple image of young adult women, par­tially or totally naked, pho­tographed out­side or inside, proud women to be cel­e­brated for the plastic beauty of their bodies.

Dahmane’s pho­to­graphic work is the oppo­site of that of Claude Mollard, less tech­nical-per­fec­tionist and much more con­cep­tual. During his travels across con­ti­nents or France, his eye sees and cap­tures faces in the con­stituent ele­ments of nature and envi­ron­ments, beings revealed by his gaze. These "Origenes" that he pho­tographs stim­u­late his reflec­tion and pro­duce a par­allel dis­course - philo­soph­ical, moral and humanist, - described as "imag­i­nary anthro­pology" by Edgar Morin.

In accor­dance with my uni­ver­sity training and my ency­clo­pedic turn of mind for more than fifty years, I car­ried out an in-depth research for my per­sonal cul­ture, I con­sti­tuted files and estab­lished lists of artists pho­tog­ra­phers and videog­ra­phers orig­i­nating from the Arab World and dias­poras,… and I always remain curious and open to artists from other geo­graph­ical, cul­tural and artistic hori­zons.

It is during these last five years that my interest in pho­tog­raphy has devel­oped, prob­ably to com­plete our col­lec­tion (very rich in paint­ings, draw­ings and works on paper, in sculp­tures, prints, artists’ books and ceramics, but poor in pho­tographs), in antic­i­pa­tion of our dona­tion of 1,500 works to the museum of the Institute of the Arab World, first in October 2018, then in October 2019. To the pho­tographs of Ridha Zili, Nassouh Zaghlouleh and Steve Sabella of the 2018 dona­tion, we added in 2019 and 2020 the photos of Dahmane, François Sargologo and Halida Boughriet.

Like thou­sands of ama­teurs, I knew the works of Bill Viola and other pioneers of Video Art, but it was very recently that I became really inter­ested in this form of art. I was impressed by these "moving photos", like in the cinema!, and pro­duced with so few means. The IMA museum had no video in its col­lec­tions and, within six months, we allowed it to acquire the first five videos, works by Bissane Al-Charif, Randa Maddah and Steve Sabella.