Ernst Haas — La couleur à toute épreuve — Les Douches la Galerie — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 7 → December 23, 2015

Living as we do in the digital age, it is difficult for us to imagine the number of photographers who found their calling after discovering the work of Ernst Haas. His publications were the bedside reading of an entire generation. His experiments with colour and movement were met with great enthusiasm… We’ve forgotten now, but colour film was difficult to handle. It was light years ago, in 1952, when the American magazine Life asked him use colour to work on the city of New York. Capa, at Magnum, was the only person who understood why he wanted to experiment with colour. After all, black and white was still king. But Ernst Haas was unperturbed. In order to understand his highly singular adventure, we must see it in its historical context. Born in 1921 to a Jewish family, Haas lived through the trauma of the Second World War. Subsequently, in 1951, he emigrated to the United States, a country he had dreamed of since his youth. He was an optimistic man, with no professional strategy, for he himself had never asked anything of anyone. He was a free man.