12 March – 13 April 2024 : Social bodies Documenting the individual as a social being : rules, codes and paradoxes
Works by Merry Alpern, Peggy Anderson, Martine Fougeron, Dave Heath, Tanya Marcuse
Virtual tour
Artists Biographies
ALPERN, Merry (1955, USA)
Merry Alpern is a contemporary American photographer known for her controversial oeuvre and utilization of surveillance photography. Born on March 15, 1955 in New York, NY, Alpern studied sociology at Grinnell College in Iowa, but returned to New York before graduating in order to pursue photography. Today, works from Dirty Windows and Shopping feature in major private and museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Works from the series were exhibited in 1996 at the Fondation Cartier (Paris) in a group exhibition entitled ‘By Night’; in 2010 at the Tate Modern (London) in a major exhibition entitled "Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera" and in the 2017 exhibition at the ICP Museum (New York), for the group exhibition "Public, Private, Secret".
ANDERSON, Peggy (1964, USA)
Peggy Anderson is an artist/photographer based in New York and Sweden, currently living in Paris. She graduated from The International Center of Photography (ICP) Creative Practice program in 2013 after many years of photography classes and workshops. Peggy’s work often embraces ritual and typology. “The Morning Dip” book was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2020. Her other signature project and book, “Subway Readers”, has also been exhibited at Fotografiska. This is a series of people reading books on the New York City subway. Some of these images are in the collection at The Museum of the City of New York. While not necessarily a portrait photographer, Peggy finds herself drawn to photographing people not only for the challenge, but also for the interaction. Working with both digital and analog film cameras are part of her creative process. Much of her image making is also inspired by her childhood summers spent in the Swedish countryside.
FOUGERON, Martine (1954, France)
Née à Paris, la photographe Martine Fougeron s'installe dans les années 90 à New York. Son travail personnel a été exposé aux États Unis, en Chine, en France, en itali, au Corée du Sud et en Suisse. La série Adrien & Nicolas, réalisée à partir de 2008 et édité chez Steidl en 2020, raconte la vie de ses deux fils, qu'elle a élevés seule entre le Bronx et la maison familiale situé dans le hameau d'Esparon, dans les Cévennes. Exposée en été 2023 au Château d'Assas, Adrien & Nicolas a été en 2013 au Gallery chez Hermès à NYC. Des oeuvres issus de cette série figurent aujourd'hui dans les collections permanentes du Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The Bronx Museum of the Arts et le Philadelphia Museum of Art. Dans le cadre de l'exposition au Château d'Assas, Fougeron a réalisé un court métrage de 30 minutes, "Summertime à Esparon", qui raconte la vie de la famille autour de la maison d'Esparon, avec des extraits de films en couleur tournés en pellicule 16mm à partir des années 50 par le père et le grand père de l'artiste, montés avec des images contemporaines de l'artiste.
HEATH, Dave (1931, Philadelphia, USA; 2016, Toronto, Canada)
Abandoned by his parents in his early childhood, Dave Heath began photographing during the late 1940s. He briefly studied art at the Philadelphia College of Art and the Institute of Design in Chicago, supporting himself as assistant to commercial photographers. By 1959, Heath was in New York where he studied with the ground-breaking photojournalist W. Eugene Smith. Working in the streets, Heath used its inhabitants to capture individual moments in tightly structured compositions that are charged with the importance of their individuality and the seriousness of their situation. Early on, he was inspired by the ability of a sequence of photographs vs. a single image to evoke the complexity of his story. Heath first came to prominence with the 1963 exhibition A Dialogue With Solitude, publihsed as a book in 1965, a moving series of black and white images addressing contemporary isolation. Heath subsequently won two Guggenheim Fellowships. In the 1970s, after moving to Toronto, Heath began experimenting with Polaroid technology and produced a series of narrative works under the title “Songs of Innocence”. From 1970 until 1997, Heath taught photography at Toronto Metropolitan University (Formerly Ryerson University) in Toronto. Dave Heath died in Toronto on his 85th birthday in 2016. His photographs are represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; International Museum of Photography, New York; George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; The Getty, Los Angeles; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; among other institutions. Works by Dave Heath are presented at Galerie Miranda in collaboration with Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto, and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC
MARCUSE, Tanya (1964, USA)
Tanya Marcuse began making photographs as an early college student at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. She went on to study Art History and Studio Art at Oberlin and earned her MFA from Yale. Her photographs are in many collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the George Eastman Museum. In 2002, she received a Guggenheim fellowship to pursue her project Undergarments & Armor. In 2005, she embarked on a three-part, fourteen-year project, Fruitless | Fallen | Woven. Fueled by the Biblical narrative of the fall from Eden, these related projects use increasingly fantastical imagery and more elaborate methods of construction to explore cycles of growth and decay and the dynamic tension between the passage of time and the photographic medium. Tanya’s books include Undergarments and Armor (Nazraeli Press, 2005), Wax Bodies, (Nazraeli Press, 2012), Fruitless | Fallen | Woven (Radius Press, 2019) and INK (Fall Line Press, 2021). She teaches Photography at Bard College, NY.