Press for En Transit at the BnF
London, 2005
A gift from the BNF reveals to the general public the talent of Paul Ickovic, a photographer born in England in 1944. Marked by the successive moves of his family, he continued his explorations of the world as an airplane pilot, his first profession. Wherever he travelled, he looked at life as a theater, reality as a scene where characters wander, and he has been lovingly watching since the age of 20 for the "decisive moment" dear to Henri Cartier-Bresson (exhibited in the gallery next door). Here are images taken since the 60's. From the United States to Nepal, from Czechoslovakia to Colombia, Ickovic encloses in his frame, with an incredible art of composition, the daily life of his contemporaries. He photographs quietly and only in black and white: chambermaids in a corridor; an abandoned pram on a sidewalk; a choreography of passers-by; games of reflections in a window... As with all the great street photographers of the twentieth century, it does not matter where the scene takes place, because it is not so much the subject that counts as the coincidence between the event, often harmless, and the eye, which will compose to make an image - a sensation in sum. Like the work of Cartier-Bresson, there is something in Ickovic's stolen moments that resembles a painting. All these strange perceptions of the city and its inhabitants, these micro-journeys between reality and illusion take us elsewhere in a space-time that the eye of the ordinary onlooker does not see. -F.C. |
"In transit: photographs by Paul Ickovic" I Until August 22 I From Tue. to Sat. ioh-igh, Sun I3h-l8h | Donors' gallery, BNF François- Mitterrand, quai François- Mauriac, 13th I Free entry. PAUL ICKOVIC I BNF, PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHY ~ from Télérama, Paris