Tondo
DANIEL BLAU is pleased to present “TONDO,” a truly unique exhibition of vintage pictures connected by their unusually well-rounded focus, for the PhotoSaintGermain Festival 2022.
The 23 photographs featured in the Anthony Meyer rooms, stretching in origin all the way back to the earliest days of the artform in the early nineteenth century, range from cityscape to portraiture, from images of far-off lunar craters to the architectural gems around us. What unifies them all is, of course, roundness, whether in their subject matter, in the technology behind them, or in the framing of the very photograph itself.
Tondi have an age-old place in art history, and with the advent of photography took a step into the modern world as well. Experimentation in roundness has been present from the first lens down through the innovation of the fisheye in the 1960s and ‘70s, reflecting the zeitgeist and aesthetic impulses of every generation from Voigtländer to Nikon. Here, DANIEL BLAU, together with SERGE PLANTUREUX, has brought together an extraordinary curation of roundness through the decades, outstanding work that encompasses historic milestones and natural timelessness, anonymous faces and monumental profiles. Lightning watchers at the Empire State are frozen in time by John Alger, beside Alvin Landon Coburn’s view of colleague Alfred Stieglitz.
“What is the aesthetic beauty of a circle? – or of a turning, curving movement,” DANIEL BLAU asks, in a recently published discussion between the two experts behind the exhibit. “Isn’t it something that is quite natural to us? Beginning with the iris being round, and the eye being round like a sphere, and the head being roundish, the sun and the moon being round… we are surrounded by all these spherical, and seemingly circular objects.” The reflection on and consideration of roundness is itself an endless one, always circling back upon itself, wherever we begin – the possibility, the potential, the resources, the subjects, the history, the technology, the very shape itself. Unusual as it can seem at first, the circle in photography is there at every turn.
The exhibition “TONDO” will be held in the Anthony Meyer Rooms at PhotoSaintGermain between November 3rd and 19th, 2022.
Exhibition Dates:
November 3rd – 19th, 2022
opening hours:
tuesday to friday
2:30 pm – 6:00 pm
and
saturdays
11:00 am – 1:00 pm
exhibition at Galerie Meyer:
17, rue des Beaux-Arts
75006 Paris – France