 Thank you. Welcome. Michelle Cotton, the head of department of artistic programs and content. I'm here with Christoph Gower, the curator of exhibitions at Moudam. And virtually, unfortunately not in real life, with Timothy Proust, the curator of the Archive of Modern Conflict. And before I go further with a short introduction to the archive, I just want to say a few words of thanks to the people that have worked on this exhibition. Firstly, colleagues across the museum, but especially Christoph and Sarah Beaumont, who were the curators that worked with me here preparing the exhibition. Also, the registrar and technical team, especially Veronique de Luzer. And then also to Francois Thierry and Tom Blessow of Polaris Architects, who have worked with us on the sonography. And last but not least, of course, the Archive of Modern Conflict, who conceived the exhibition for Moudam, especially, and loaned all the works and did a phenomenal job of producing this exhibition with us, especially to you, Timothy, and Michelle Wilson, who also can't be with us tonight, but was here with us last week, installing the exhibition here in Luxembourg. And to Lucila Bart, who also worked with us on some texts. So just a few words of introduction. We're going to talk with Timothy about the archive a little bit more, but this exhibition is programmed on the occasion of the eighth European month of photography here in Luxembourg. It's organized, the European Month of Photography is organized by Café Crem in partnership with members from the other European cities in Berlin, Lisbon, and Paris and Vienna. And this year's exhibition is organized under the thematic banner of rethinking nature, rethinking landscape. Our exhibition here at Moudam presents 220 images from the Archive of Modern Conflict, which was established in London in 1992. It's one of the largest private collections of photography in the world. And to date, it's published something in the region of 70 books on their collection and has produced numerous exhibitions, including presentations at L'Oréal Contre d'Arles in 2017 and 2018 and at Tate Modern in London in 2014 and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto. I think we'll see a couple of images of those exhibitions tonight. So firstly, we want to talk about, just to introduce the archive of Modern Conflict. I think a lot of people form some impression of, or already formed some impression of what they might see here at Moudam just based on the name of the organization. Timothy, it was originally conceived as a collection focusing on the history of war and violence. I wondered if you could tell us about the name, the Archive of Modern Conflict, and also what it was about that subject and its representation in photography that inspired you to start this collection. Well, at the very beginning, what struck us was the big difference between the private records of people who were involved in different kinds of conflict and the official records. So in a sense, we started just looking at the vernacular and the snapshot photography which was made by people during a historic event. And the more we looked into it, the more we found the chasm between what was thought to be history and how it was perceived by amateur photographers was two completely different things. And in a sense, that was why we started to embrace other subjects apart from conflict. And we could never really define what conflict was anyway. And it seems to be everywhere. It seems to be hardwired into human beings and into nature. So I guess our first forays outside the strictly conflict-based idea came just months after we started in the early 90s. And we started to find collections that were to do with politics or architecture or fashion or landscape that in different ways connected to the small collection about conflict that we'd started. And as the range of subjects grew, the interconnection between the genres became more and more pronounced. That's not only an effect of time and place and sometimes the same photographer being involved in the different genres, but as much as anything, it was a kind of emotional similarity between how those subjects were dealt with different times in history. And just one of the first curations I made just, it was never shown back in the early 90s. I looked at photos from 1914 that were nothing to do with the First World War. And when you put them together, that sort of magic happened by the, by them all being seen side by side. And that kind of set us on a curatorial path where we just have never wanted to follow any established or set way of curating photos. I guess that was a little bit about the inception of the archive, but carry on, Michel. I'll ask some more. Thank you. Today's archive is a major collection. It includes more than eight millions of images from all disciplines, all kinds of images, anonymous or very major photographers, also objects, ephemera, postcards. We will be curious to hear you about the way the archive has developed over the years. You often say that images comes to you, rather than you finding the images. Yeah. And I also like to think that in a way, the archive collected itself. Of course, it has human agency within its construction, but there's a great portion of it, which is just come to us by happenstance and luck. That's not to say there isn't a plan to try and find something. And I've often said that if you wish for something hard enough, quite often it'll come to you, maybe not in exactly the same form that you wished in the first place, but something will come. And this is just a totally normal human effect. You ask enough people for something and they ask all their friends. And then somewhere along the line, a light bulb will go off with someone and they'll say, I've got something like that. And then it wends its way back to you. And that works time and time again. And through that process, you build up friendships and relationships and you make new colleagues. And then you have something which is almost alive as a supply chain. But of course, we always look in the normal places as well, like in auction rooms and in flea markets and in bookshops and antique shops. But over the years I've come to realize that a lot of the best things we find come from that personal contact with people and archives which are still within the private realm. And another thing to do with that process is when you wish for something, you set a goal. But along the way, different avenues might open up to other ideas or other pathways which you don't know where they're leading, but you have a kind of an intuitive feeling that that's a good place to go. And I think that's not necessarily a conventional way to collect, but it has served us quite well. And along with that is good to set a goal, but I've never been convinced about people setting end goals that they have to reach. And I think in a lot of places that term mission statement is something that we all hear a lot. And quite often it's not exactly nonsense, but it's stullifying because then you're not embracing the opportunities which life will present to you. It's very true. I'd say just a little bit more about that finding of things in relation to the last year, which has been a shock for me because the collecting has often involved kinds of travel, maybe just to the next street, but maybe to the other side of the world. And of course, the last year it's been completely different and I thought I've had to adapt to the virtual world in a way I never imagined, but the same processes you can kind of replicate, it would never be the same or never as much fun, but you can still do the same just using the internet and different kinds of technology. We should say perhaps that the archive is, although it's mainly photography, it's not only photography, there are things in the collection that are not photographs. Well, I think that's just like life, photography doesn't exist in a bubble and never has. It's sometimes been projected as a thing with its completely own arena and personality, but I don't buy into that. I think it's just another cultural manifestation. So we've collected lots of manuscripts and texts and books and objects, and most often they tie into the stories we've found about photography, but not necessarily, it could work the other way round. You might find an object which inspires you for any number of reasons, and then you find the photographic background to that story later and you've come to the object first, but I would say most commonly we find a thread in the photography and that leads us to the objects. I'm horrified to see how messy that archive looks. I'm not gonna be having any of that, we need a tidy up. Well, in fact, that's quite old that photo and it is a bit tidy here at the moment, but I'm not saying that I dislike extremely orderly and tidy archives because I love them, but there is a way when I look at that photo, I see that it's a working place and a laboratory as much as it is a repository for photography. Tim, you were highlighting the importance of travel for the development of the archive. And you also have a kind of network of, as you said, friendships, friends over the world. You work with what we could call a correspondent in a way in different countries. Yes, and I love to keep in touch with them even if nothing happens for years. Oh, I see we've changed to India now, which is like, I guess, in all our minds at the moment. And it's with a lot of sadness at what a terrible time they're having. But I always had great fun and a lot of curiosity when I was traveling around India. And I particularly fell in love with the photography around earlier Bollywood. And just when I look at these, I am struck not only by the beauty of the color and the composition, but they are always making me smile. I just noticed on the one we see on the right, there's Satsava. I must put that alongside slight lookalikes of Tatlin's Tower. I'd never noticed that before now. It's like some veritable Tower of Babel, but I love also the hand-tinting that you get in a lot of the earlier Bollywood lobby cards. These are both lobby cards and would be stuck inside the entrance of an Indian cinema when a new show came. And the wonder of the graphics and the photography around the Indian film industry are just pretty much unknown in Europe. And so with keeping friends with Bollywood-related dealers in India, I've continued to collect those kinds of images, although I haven't been to India for six or seven years now. I've still talked to, as you would say, the correspondents all of the time and hear what's happening and what they've been looking at, what they've been thinking about. And I'm always trying to just get them to move sideways because I'm known for buying the Bollywood material, but I always will make suggestions. Why not look at that? Why not look at some advertising photography or why not look at Indian trade newspapers and go and see if they've got to some photo archives? And from doing that, we found some just exceptional things which I would never have dreamt of if I hadn't kept that kind of relationship going with people across the planet. I'd have to put my glasses on, but I think the one on the left is a superb example of product placement and a very extreme one, because if I'm not wrong, she's got two bottles of Johnny Walker on her shoulder. I think that's wonderful. I can't remember what image we have next, but I think, yes. Oh, these were from the Atex exhibition. Carry on. No, no. We wanted also to talk about your exhibition and publication activities. You often describe the archive as a laboratory and this is developed, especially through the exhibitions and the very creative publications that you create. We just took a few examples. One of these important installations that you created in 2014 as part of a larger group exhibition at Tate Modern. It was about conflict, time and photography. And we could say it was an exhibition within the exhibition. Yes, that's right. And when I look at these, I remember two of my big inspirations for this. One was visiting museums in developing countries and seeing their style of display and how different it was from the extremely measured and orderly way we do that in the Occidental world. And the other inspiration were the little collections and museums you find all over the world in people's back gardens where they're obsessed by a theme and they've got a lifetimes collection and they go and sit in that room and just look and look and play with the objects and images. And although this exhibition at the Tate had many layers, there was something quite benign about the environment. And I found that hard to explain except that the sources were those two things that I just described. Interesting to see those two chairs. I was worrying for a long time before this about much older people in their late 70s, 80s and 90s. You still wanted to go to museums to see what was happening and what was new. So I thought I'd put in some very homely and comfortable and simple 19th century chairs for people to relax on. But actually not that many people sat on them. They thought they were part of the installation. Of course they are. And they thought that because it was art you couldn't sit on it. That wasn't a source of frustration but it just made me think something about how we're also used to not being allowed to touch art and sit on it and explore its more sensual aspects. And it's sad in a way people feel they can't sit down in a... Of course you can sit down in on-fans so because there's really nice comfy contemporary art museum benches in there. Yes, and we've positioned them as per your instruction to have them as if they just dropped from the sky. Isn't it nice when you see people relaxing and talking about an exhibition sitting down and discussing it rather than like in front of the pictures whispering which I don't know how that evolved as part of an exhibition culture but I've noticed it lots of times that kind of we mustn't disturb the other. I have to talk in a hushed voice as if the museum or gallery is some kind of extension of the church. We also have I think some images of exhibition you made devoted to vernacular Chinese food photography. Oh yes, that was so much fun. That was with my friend Ruben Lundgren and just we set about collecting the craziest Chinese food photos that we could find. So a lot of them came from 1970s and 80s Chinese advertising. Others came from personal albums but I'd say the biggest group came from the culture of competitive Chinese cooking in China and I was so worried before that exhibition that the humour would be misinterpreted. But actually the response was fantastic and you can't see it in these photos but we set up a small fake restaurant there was nothing to eat apart from sunflower seeds which you could throw on the floor and that was wonderful to see the Chinese people really enjoying that sitting down experience as well. And you can't also see it here but that was there was some giganticism as in Enfanceur but with food. So I think we had a five metre long wall of a model of the Great Wall of China made out of spam which had a fantastic resonance because a wall of spam means something else within that context of evading internet restriction. I think we have a few more images of exhibitions but perhaps we can skip over them and just show them briefly that we have time to talk about Enfanceur. Absolutely. So here's just a couple of books. The one on the left was an exhibition in our about the photography and wonder of Colombia where obviously everyone just thinks about suitcases full of cash, cocaine, civil war but the country is so much richer than that in so many ways and that book we made on old 1950s printing presses in Colombia and then it's got tipped in photos by people who wanted wanted that job. Next one along that one that's menu that went with the Chinese exhibition and again it's got hand mounted photos in it but the bindings we just bought on the Chinese internet and then constructed the book within the boards to speak. So here's the book. It's called The Way's Eyelash which was a great pleasure to make that one. It was to write the history of the world using 19th century microscope slides and I'm still enjoying looking at that because like the detail in the printing those are just three of a huge number of books we've made and there we are. Maybe just before we move to the exhibition at Moudam, we could talk briefly about something which I think is very important in the project of the archive which is this idea of narrative, of forgotten stories I think you describe the archive as a collection of stories and also you often explore the possibility of fiction within the archive. I'm very interested in when new material arrives to make sure that it's well looked after and we make a good record as possible and I love it when within the new arrivals we discover new histories or at least new takes on the accepted narrative. For me that's probably the driving forces to discover more about forgotten stories and consequently more about who we are as an animal and well up on the wall now is just a few pictures there where some, it's a potpourri but I'm always looking out for pictures of new inventions and I love the one in the middle there with the stepladder for hanging pictures and you often see those but that was I think at the time it was invented and I have seen similar things recently and that's maybe a good thing for museums to have variants of that, not exactly a ladder but a very useful tool and I can't really see too clearly but bear with me a second. I like the one on the top right with the girl and the game because I think that's 1920s or 30s but it feels to me like a prototype of a laptop as if technology was just not thought of but our minds were going in that direction and beneath that is a First World War image of pigeons being used for sending messages and I've loved everything to do with the history of pigeons and man and in the First World War it was an incredible culture of message sending and that's ended up in this potpourri and the man with the spade in the bottom left that was a good example of a forgotten story it's from the north of England and from the 1920s maybe early 30s and from working men's clubs they started to do art classes and then a group was formed called the Pitman painters which were coal miners who liked painting in their spare time and now we look back and see wow that was such a sensational thing to happen and some of the images they made were totally fantastic I can't remember this man's name but he was one of those early Pitman painters and I knew nothing about that before I found the story through photography this was a slide about fiction it comes from this book a book called The Luton Orgaries as I said we like to preserve the photos and then see what stories are lost within them but that should never stop us making our own fictions using photography and I loved making this book I was laughing so much I really recommend to anyone you've got to buy a copy of this because it only takes about 15 minutes to go through the pictures but basically the story which I invented was in the town of Luton sometime in the 1970s it didn't stop raining and that led to mental instability and a number of religious delusions so on the left you see a vicar pointing to a patch of water on the floor which has come through the roof and within the story of The Luton Orgaries that constituted a miracle the next one is really true the next one that is a man from the water board trying to get payment or evict some hippies from a squat and the next one that you see within the story was about creating a robot army to keep people in order whilst the rain continued to fall down and it sounds totally mad but the more I look at it I just enjoy the story and enjoy the jokes and I think that's about four or five years ago so for me at least that book has some legs and published by that French publisher RVB who we've worked with on some other books and they're quite an interesting publisher and there's a kind of fictional proposition that's the premise of our exhibition here at Moudin also perhaps we should say a few words to this here well I'd love to so Onfansil is primarily an exploration of some curious byways of plant photography from its inception in the 1840s through to the 1970s but Onfansil or in English last we're alone is the plants talking people and all the animals and all the insects have disappeared so in the whole exhibition you won't see one living creature but how did that happen well there's no explanation given and why did it happen there's no explanation given there might be some clues well there's a few flying saucers in the exhibition but that might have nothing at all to do with why all the people have gone but I also find it more than anything a what if exhibition what if all the people and animals did disappear what would happen to the plants if you follow that kind of line of thinking well the self seeding plants would thrive and the ones that need insects and animals would die away and I love that thing of what if history that is such a genre in itself now and I thought it would be just nice to do a kind of what if exhibition about the disappearance of humans and animals and then I hope people will think around that proposition and not necessarily come to any definite conclusion but just to talk and think about a world devoid of humans but kind of walking around when you see that world with nobody in it it's strangely relaxing and I didn't mean at all to relate to anything to do with the pandemic but sometimes when I've been walking in a forest and there's no one there and there's more bird life than I remember from the year before there's some sort of echo of some sort of echo of the notion of the people disappearing and well I'm really hoping that on those seats in the exhibition people will take that what if idea and chat about it and think well have you thought of this have you thought of that and that's a pretty much a consistent with all our shows and I know shows all over the place what you really want to do is inspire some discussion and communication between people so that's the underlying underlying fiction of on fans all is that everybody has gone and there's no answer we counted the number of photographs but actually I have no idea how many photographers we have in the exhibition overall but we have a great range of photography in terms of photographic processes that are represented but also in the kind of photography we have images taken by artists but we also have a lot of different kinds of vernacular photography which is obviously clearly a large part of the archives work this image I believe on this slide is by Amelia Gimingham is that correct absolutely forgotten and quite wonderful late 19th century woman photographer who was only remembered really for her designs which are part of the sort of English arts and crafts movement and such a pleasure for the archive to find forgotten photographers who are wonderful and she's really a sensation and had thought long and hard about the nature of photographing plants we haven't got so much text by her but there is some and she was thoughtful about the design of the photos and clearly the technical principles behind what she was doing and I was delighted to find the first group about ten or eleven years ago now and they came with a lot of documentation and then about eight years after that I found another group but with no writing on them but clearly the construction of the physical print the compositions the paper the printing out paper they were on are all entirely similar so about half the Gimingham's we've got a hundred percent ascribable to her the other half I like to attribute them to her because it would be all too easy just to say oh they're definitely by her if they're not by her they're by someone incredibly close and at the end of the day I don't really mind if they're by the attributed ones or by her or not but I will find out eventually who took them that's another thing I think relates to that persistence within the collecting I'm not going to give up on trying to nail both the provenance and the photographer of the ones that we have to attribute to her at the moment but the print quality it's sensational and it's just amazing how many photographers are just slip into slip into history unnoticed and such a joy to find a big group of work and then to unpick the story but there's a lot of her things in Enfance so I was so glad to be able to give her a good showing and hopefully slowly start to re-establish her reputation what the exhibition also illustrates is a very intimate link between photography and plants in a text that Luc Le Bard wrote about for the show but this link with light in fact both plants and photography coming from or needing light to grow you also talked when you were here during the installation about mystery and this link between plants and photography comes from the very beginning of photography we have also beautiful examples in the exhibition of Anna Atkins Cianotypes Yes there's Anna Atkins and that's one of the really the first generations of photos from the 1840s made with the cyanotype technique and Anna Atkins was a pioneer of photography a friend of Fox Talbot but before that she'd been a botanist and one sub-collection at the archive is actually real herbariums with real plants and I was looking through one some time ago and the post was used a lot at that time to send plant samples to friends I found Anna Atkins had sent her in one herbarium there was a note saying this was sent to me by Anna Atkins that was like in the mid 1830s before there were photos and I just love it that there was a woman collector who was so technically talented that it's more than that so scientific in her approach to plants and to typologies and there's some other there's another mystery underneath I can't remember if it's this one or the other Anna Atkins it's from a herbarium in from Sri Lanka and she of course was friendly with the famous English photographer Julia Margaret Cameron who for some time was living in Sri Lanka and I just would love to be able to find a connection between between those two things but going back to what you said Christoph about the relationship between plants and photography it probably goes back to way before the beginnings of photography into alchemy and a lot of the genesis of photography actually comes from alchemical experiments in the 17th century and even earlier you might be aware that the shroud of Turin is often thought to be one of the earliest photographs and there's even mention going back to Sophocles of a mysterious pond of mercury where you stick in a plate and then you can see your reflection and it disappears so although obviously photography was invented in the late 1830s its genesis I think goes back centuries and a lot of those early processes from the 1840s all kinds of plants were used in the process I read a fantastic thing some time ago about I don't know the French word for it in English it's called an oak apple it's a plant, a little kind of growth that insects make on oak trees and there's a chemical in that that was used in the developing process and so that link between photography and plants operates on many levels and is an intimate entwined history Next we have another image by Gimingham but I remember you saying Timothy when we were working on the exhibition that looking at a lot of these botanical studies it's almost like sometimes it's almost like there's a subgenre or there is subgenre of portrait photography in the sense that the way that they focus on a single subject be it a plant or be it a plant I'm looking at plants either in my garden or in photos they do seem to me each one to have an individual personality like a person and of course one of the first things in the photography in the 1840s was to document people and I think a lot of the tropes and methods of lighting that were used first in documenting friends and colleagues then came to document different things in the natural world and plants are the one of the most obvious ones where you can bring out the character by using the light to emphasise different parts of the personality of the subject and of course I was thinking quite a lot about that when we were making the show and there are some plants that are like thugs really aggressive and nasty with other plants and there are others which are really delicate and shy and they seem in some way obviously through the human gaze to condense the gamut of personality types that we have in the human world but I know that might not make a lot of sense to some people but you ask any keen gardener and they'll agree with that thesis It might be more evident when you're inside the exhibition you see the plants on a similar scale to the people in the room and it's another really interesting thing for me to redress that balance of size that we're always looking down at a little mushroom and then to have one towering over you gives you just a different perspective about what the plant is and I hope in some way the whole exhibition calls into question with plants because we think we tend the fields we tend the forests we tend our gardens but are we really are we just in effect doing what the plants make us do to make them grow of course that sounds it sounds aberrant but you just have to try and think less from that human perspective and I know there's been so much literature in the last few years about the intelligence of plants and I think it's probably a more prominent thought than it was a decade ago even What was also fascinating working on this exhibition was to discover all the stories all the narratives, biographies that lie behind the images and we see that in many cases the borders between fields are not so clear like a scientist will will be also an amateur photograph and then he will use photography in his scientific practice we have here a few examples maybe we don't have time to go through all of them but would you choose between you can field green or can you say we can have a look at see theodore greens would be quite nice to do that so here's another lost photographer that I found his work in under a table in a book fair and he has a strange relationship to the other man Christoph just mentioned Duncan fields so this is see theodore green and he wrote one groundbreaking book in his life about self seeding weeds in urban environments which is such a modern subject he wrote it in the 1890s and it was about his hometown of Stockport and about Liverpool and he took endless photos of things which had just grown without human intervention and so we researched him a little bit wonderful photographer totally forgotten used all kinds of colour filters hand colouring and then I was researching this other one Duncan Field Jones and I found out they lived a couple of streets away this is Duncan Field Jones and within one of the boxes of the other guy see theodore green and I found this photographer about butterflies in Brazil these are both Brazilian images and I just thought how wonderful this lost relationship between two photographers coming together in such a strange way because they were both fantastic photographers both completely forgotten and that brings us back to the thing at the beginning of what we were first talking you know perhaps the photos are collecting themselves because the chances of something like that happening you would think would be too great but actually not those coincidences just occur over and over the one you see at the moment the Duncan Field pictures Englishman in Brazil in the 1880s and 1890s in very lost parts but somehow making such a seticised images really not the images of a conventional tourist really like an artist photographer and rather like his friend see theodore green he wrote a groundbreaking book but his was about the butterflies of Brazil of which I found the notes in a box of the other guy so like what a world of coincidences I like the idea that the plants are taking over and the photographs are collecting themselves we might be out of a job soon but you know if you can use those curious effects why not perhaps we have a few more minutes for some questions take some questions from the audience anyone have a question oh what a deafening silence we can't have so many people in auditoriums these days as you know did you catch that the question is about how you deal with photos yes of course I've collected salmon I should do a lot more life is sadly quite short and there's not time enough to do the thing but I found the believable digital collections just off the top of my head I went to Nigeria to where the Nollywood films are made the Nigerian cinema is very rich and active at the moment and I've found fantastic digital files of backstage production of the movies of the parties, the makeup and they've never existed before and I was absolutely delighted to and I would love to be a bit more coherent in collecting digital images maybe we are collecting more and more but there's something so beautiful about the image on paper and of course in a lot of instances we digitise the works we have on paper I just wish I could live another 100 years and properly crack into the collecting the digital but sometimes there's just not enough time in a day thank you the name the words you are looking for yes I was thinking about what you were talking before you were saying before photography was fixed on the support many people tried to produce images and I was thinking it was maybe the apple of the oak tree you see what we call the pomme ferro gallique in French I think it's iron gallic I don't know the English term but I know it's gallic acid it's a very small thing you can smash it and cook it and then you get ink blue, black ink I think that was one way to search to get photographs at that time I heard that I don't know anything about the technical aspects but I heard there was a lot of experiment using the ink produced by that thing I just wonder that photography has that history going way back in time searching to fix an image I imagine there were countless failed experiments for hundreds of years that led to that time in the late 1830s where it all of a sudden became possible or 1820s it was a lot of such a good subject I wish there was more and more research into that kind of proto photography many people do and some people don't want other people to search about it because they discover very strange things going back to Lascaux the Picasso in Lascaux had small figures that were captured in bones and then you put them on a stick and then you go to a cavern and you have torches so it's like it was a projection and many people don't want to know that but it's probably true absolutely I just guess it's hardwired into us to make images and always has been and maybe even before we evolved into what we are I imagine there was that urge to make an image and always as you were saying with the shadows to make a moving image it's such a rich history the whole thing has and as Michelle and Christoph were pointing out the relationship between the plant world and the photo goes back a long way but I'm glad you picked up on that point thank you Timothy are there any more questions? there are no more questions then I'm going to suggest that we all go and have a look at the exhibition but we're very sorry not to have you here as I said earlier with us here tonight it was pleasure to be there even if it's a photograph of a moving photograph of me and thank you everyone for listening I hope you enjoy looking around the exhibition and thanks to you all at Moudin for bringing it all together so well thank you Timothy it was our pleasure