Richard Kalvar: Selected Writings
By (Author) Richard Kalvar
Damiani
Damiani
30th November 2023
26th October 2023
Italy
General
Non Fiction
818.6
Paperback
144
Width 220mm, Height 220mm
620g
Richard Kalvar has spent over fifty years observing humans through his camera lens, trying to understand the ambiguous and mysterious relation between outward appearances and inner feelings. Not always successfully. With Selected Writings he shifts his gaze from what people physically reveal to what they write. That should be much clearer, but is it Kalvar delicately navigates his way though the fog of expression, bumping along the way into joy, anger, confusion, incomprehensibility, and meaning often turned awry. What's on offer here is a collection of bizarre and fascinating visual messages, both intentional and unintentional, cast out in the world The result is unexpected, and often very funny.
Richard Kalvar was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1944. In 1965 he interrupted his literature studies, and with absolutely no knowledge of or interest in photography, managed to be hired as an assistant by French fashion photographer Jrme Ducrot. Clearly fashion was not for him, but he began taking pictures in the streets of New York with his boss's cameras, and was soon bitten by the photography bug. A ten-month hitch-hiking trip around western Europe the following year confirmed his vocation. He moved to Paris in 1970, and helped found the Viva agency. In 1975 he joined Magnum Photos, and became a full member in 1977. He has served as president, and is currently vice-president of the Paris office. Kalvar has worked extensively for the media in the US, Europe and Asia, but considers himself less a photojournalist than an anti-photojournalist. He explores appearance and its tenuous and ambiguous relationship to reality. His images, always unposed, often ironic, play on a discrepancy between the banality of a real situation and a feeling of strangeness that emerges from a particular choice of timing and framing. A major retrospective of his work was shown at the Maison Europenne de la Photographie in 2007, accompanied by his book Earthlings (Flammarion). A Photo Poche and Photofile edited by Robert Delpire were published in 2018. Kalvar's most recent exhibition, La voce delle mani, opened at the Palazzo Callas, Sirmione, Italy in July 2022.