For their 2015 edition, the organization of Parcours des Mondes will present an exhibition about one of the best known photographers of African art: Hughes Dubois. It runs from Wednesday 9 September through Sunday 13 September, daily from 11AM to 6PM at 22, rue Visconti in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. For thirty-five years, Dubois has worked for the world’s leading museums, institutions, art galleries and private collectors all over the world, for whom he has taken more than 50,000 photographs, published for the most part in some 150 works.
The exhibition will explore his work in an intimate way, and reveal a new side of his work. It begins with the first “North Sea” Polaroids, in which the young photographer offers a glimpse of his poetic vision of the landscapes of his childhood through a series of triptychs. The exhibition takes us then to the source of his professional work, with the presentation of 140 Polaroids of art objects. Until the American manufacturer ceased production of these mythical cameras in 2007, photographers used them to make test prints before taking their definitive shots. Dubois kept these Polaroids in meticulously annotated albums which today constitute the souvenirs of his archives, a selection of these Polaroids is shown here. They are arranged in thematic groupings which follow the photographer’s path, and become witnesses of a bygone practice now superseded by the digital age.
Dubois’ personal projects were realized with his wife Caroline Leloup-Dubois, with whom he worked in close collaboration. Enthralled by the Buddhist temple of Borobodur on the island of Java, they would shoot photographs together, by the light of the full moon, of the bas-reliefs depicting the phases of Buddha’s life. Beginning in 2016, a traveling exhibition will present life-size prints of these shots, which will give the viewer the opportunity to experience the monumentality of the edifice, and to feel the very unique aesthetic emotion which the light of the full moon creates, and which Dubois so delicately captures. A print from this future show will be seen here as a preview.
