Jeff Weber | Image Storage Containers: Centre National de l'Audiovisuel (CNA) | Dudelange

7 May - 1 October 2023
Overview
Jeff Weber, Untitled (Operation Ivy, Mike), 2011-2013 Documentation of the restoration of photographs from the collection The Family of Man at the CNA by Studio Berselli. Courtesy of the artist, 2011-2013, gelatin silver print, 86 x 110,5 cm (unframed) 107 x 130 cm (framed), edition of 4 + 2AP Courtesy of the artist, CNA & Erna Hecey Gallery

Jeff Weber, Untitled (Operation Ivy, Mike), 2011-2013
Documentation of the restoration of photographs from the collection The Family of Man at the CNA by Studio Berselli. Courtesy of the artist, 2011-2013, gelatin silver print, 86 x 110,5 cm (unframed) 107 x 130 cm (framed), edition of 4 + 2AP
Courtesy of the artist, CNA & Erna Hecey Gallery

In a series of photographs from 2011, artist Jeff Weber documented the restoration work undertaken on a large photograph of the 1952 hydrogen bomb test (“Ivy Mike”) included in The Family of Man exhibition, part of a general restoration carried out by Studio Berselli of Milan between 2011 and 2013 under the auspices of the Centre National de l’Audiovisuel (CNA), where it has been on permanent display since 1994. Outside of the delicious paradox presented by documenting a restoration process conducted on an image depicting destruction on a monumental scale, Weber, an artist notable for identifying representational shifts and an interest in blurring what can properly be considered inside or outside a work of art, has described his motivation as a move to contextualize The Family of Man within the era of its creation — the Cold War and nuclear arms race. So contextualized, his photographs of the restoration process become both an antithetical representation of the exhibition and its much-vaunted humanist intentions, as well as an uncannily accurate depiction of the pervasive political atmosphere in which it traveled.

This impulse to follow antagonisms (discernible in the associative and contingent details of any photograph) led to a second body of work, Image Storage Container, prompted by his noting, while documenting the conservators at work, a slatted box used to transport and store photographic prints. Taken by its peculiar form, the following year Weber produced the series using a self-made replica, documenting the play of light and shadow passing through the box’s slatted aperture and onto a white backdrop using a variety of flashes, employing a neutral clinical style reminiscent of conceptual photography’s affinity for “applied photography.”
 
Excerpt from All That Is Solid Melts into Light, by Michael Baers in Jeff Weber's book Image Storage Containers published by Centre National de l’Audiovisuel (CNA), Luxembourg, in co-edition with Institute of Contemporary Art New York, and Gevaert Editions, Brussels. 
 
The exhibition is organised within the framework of EMOP 2023.
Installation Views
Jeff Weber, Image Storage Containers, 2023
Exhibition view at Centre National de l'Audiovisuel, Dudelange
Courtesy of the artist, CNA & Erna Hecey Gallery
Works
Video
Press/Book Release

Jeff Weber: Image Storage Containers

by Steven Humblet in Camera Austria

 

Since 1994, the Luxembourg-based Centre national de l’audiovisuel (CNA) has had the famous Family of Man exhibition of 1952 on permanent display at its Clairvaux site (originally conceived and curated by the Luxembourg-born Edward Steichen while he was the curator of the photography department at MoMA in New York). Between 2011 and 2013, the CNA undertook a large restoration project of the exhibition prints. In this time frame, the Belgian photographer and filmmaker Jeff Weber made a series of six images of the restoration of one particular image from that exhibition: a photograph of the Ivy Mike hydrogen bomb test of 1952. This series, together with nine other images showing different interpretations of a self-made image storage container, is now presented in a small exhibition curated by Michèle Walerich at the CNA in Dudelange. [...]

 

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Jeff Weber: Image Storage Containers

by Hannah Sage Kay in The Brooklyn Rail

 

Since 1994, Edward Steichen’s landmark exhibition The Family of Man has been on display at Clervaux Castle—an outpost of the Centre national de l'audiovisuel (CNA)—in northern Luxembourg. Between 2011 and 2013, these works underwent a campaign of conservation treatments that Luxembourger photographer Jeff Weber was invited to document. While such preservationist practices could be imagined as shoring up the ability of the photograph to serve as an objective arbiter of sociohistorical truths, the series of images that Weber captured instead illuminates the irony of repairing an image of mass destruction—the iconic photograph of an atomic mushroom cloud that Steichen used to close his exhibition—and more generally highlights the potential for the medium’s manipulation by way of its very conservation. [...]

 

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