Helmut Newton showed them, dressed or undressed, confident and proud; Guy Bourdin staged them as persiflage of sex and crime; Juergen Teller consciously provoked with the idea of “white trash”. The women Jacques Olivar (*1941) photographs appear like the heroines of old Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films in the heyday of Kodacolor, when after the roar of the lion, passion, yearning, and drama inexorably unfolds. And at the same time the models he arranges and stages so theatrically seem absent, solitary, perhaps even melancholy.
What characterizes Olivar’s photos and makes them so filmic is the narrative condensed into one single image – a plot we have to puzzle together in our own imagination. Only few photographers like the Casablanca-born Olivar are in the position to stage every detail so precisely and simultaneously allow us the space to create our own photo narratives. What Olivar, like Newton or Bourdin, masters so convincingly is the art of suggestion, visual seduction and building tension, so that we look at his images and automatically ask ourselves what happened before and after the split-second of the situation captured.
Art is often the most exciting when it throws the viewer back for a moment. In this way, Olivar’s photographs repeatedly ask: Does Olivar’s subject belong to the millions of lonely hearts of the city, or is she so lost in thought because she is right in that moment experiencing an emotional drama or is about to experience one a few seconds after the picture is taken?
Lumas Editions Gallery in Berlin Mitte shows the extraordinary women of Jacques Olivar with the exhibition True Romance.
EXHIBITION April 11-June 24 2008
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