Le goût de la modernité — Marvin E. Newman — Les Douches la Galerie — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 9 → June 2, 2018

Marvin E. Newman, the storyteller, Marvin E. Newman the inventor. Marvin E. Newman, the charmer.

Marvin E. Newman, Winter Boardwalk, 1953 Archival pigment print, printed later — 43 × 56 cm — Editions of 10 Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York / Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

At the age of ninety, with a mischievous glint in his eye, Marvin E. Newman casually drops a thousand tales that tell the story of American photography from the end of the Second World War to the present day. He’s an inquisitive man who embraces the world and never takes himself too seriously.

Marvin E. Newman, Legs, Wainting to Cross, Chicago, 1951 Six Archival pigment print, printed later — 18 × 14 cm — Editions of 10 Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York / Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

He has photographed everything with great enthusiasm: from street reporting to advertising and sports, from night life to high fashion. Like many photographers of his generation, he has never shied away from any commission. But as he has done so, he has remained staunchly faithful to what he learned in 1949 from his teachers at the Chicago Institute of Design (which began as the New Bauhaus). As he himself says, ‘no matter what I shoot, I always photograph for myself’. Marvin E. Newman took especially to heart one of the precepts of that mythical school’s founder, Lázló Mohóly Nágy: always experiment and keep experimenting. Leave the beaten paths, embrace new technologies. Impose your vision.

Nowadays, Marvin E. Newman devotes himself to his archives with renewed passion, revisiting his work through the lens of digital prints.

Marvin E. Newman, Time Square Bookstore, 1954 Archival pigment print, printed later — 56 × 43 cm — Edition of 10 Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York / Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

It is with great pleasure that the Gallery is able to present Marvin E. Newman’s first personal exhibit in France, with a selection of his work that ranges from the first photographs he made while still a student in Chicago in 1950 to his works from the 2000s. In addition, we are showing Church on Maxwell Street, the film he made with his famous colleague, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, in 1951, about the street where Chicago blues was born — a little seven-minute jewel of a film.