“From Image To Reality”
Photography Exhibition
By Francine Finck
28th October to 12th November
Centre d’Art Citadines
Opening Saturday 28th October at 4pm
“My child, my sister,
Think of the rapture
Of living together there!
Of loving at will,
Of loving till death
In the land that is like you”
The famous poem ”Invitation to the Voyage” by Charles Beaudelaire accompanied by the photograph of two young Sri Lankan girls dreaming, is the opening of the black and white photography exhibition “From Image to Reality” that Francine Finck is presenting this coming week at Citadines.
The exhibition is a retrospective of a life – with its dreams, emptiness and the hope of what the future will bring. Professional and amateur photographers will especially appreciate Francine’s remarkable use of argentic, or analog, photography.
This adventurous woman from Mulhouse, France, started her professional life as a female comedian, and went on to be a genetic medicine technician, which is when her interest in photography truly emerged. At that time, in the dark room, she developed pictures of cells and chromosomes!
Her journey includes workshops with world famous photographers, crossing Egypt all the way to Khartoum with her Leica and documenting psychiatry in villages in Senegal. She was a great friend of the late Aurovillian photographer Dominique Darr and helped in the creation of Dominique’s book and exhibition on the Matrimandir in 2017, “When the Adventure Begins”.
“Above being a biographic itinerary, this work would like to be a testimony of games with images, reality and symbolism, through a moment of life”, says Francine. With 20 photographs, all powerful in their content and quality, the exhibition unfolds like a literary allegory of dreams and emptiness. It starts with travel pictures taken in Sri Lanka, India, Arles (France), and Senegal, and then moves suddenly to empty bedrooms, two of them with white wedding dresses on a chair or hanging, almost like they were waiting to be worn. I won’t spoil the continuation of the exhibition as it moves on from emptiness to Godliness in its own way.
Apart from the moving story and the superb curating, it is the quality that makes this exhibition exceptional. Note has to be made of the print, details, composition, lines, writing – all requiring structure and discipline. Without rigidity, Francine knows how to stay elegantly sober and precise, and in a way this is what gives superiority to this specific black and white work.
From cells to photographic art, this beautiful ‘movie’ of a photographic life starts with an invitation to a voyage and all the hope it holds, and ends by opening up to the future with a picture of Auroville: A naked young child runs through the foliage of lush trees and the description reads, “Laboratory of Evolution Research on a Plateau of Red Soil in Tamil Nadu”.
Francine Finck is a Friend of Auroville.
By Chana Corinne Devor for AVArts
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From Image to Reality
Photography exhibition
Francine Finck
On view each day till Sunday, 12th November 2.30pm – 5.30pm
At Centre d’Art Citadines
