Mieux photographier, Thomas Mailaender

Originally, the title of a photography manual published by Kodak in 1982, Mieux Photographier is a new exhibition by the artist Thomas Mailaender organized by invitation of Franklin Azzi, in his agency located at 13 rue d’Uzès in Paris.

This exhibition is the result of a meeting between the architect Franklin Azzi, and the visual artist Thomas Mailaender whose work is always around the history of photography and the different mediums that have marked it. Thomas Mailaender chose to exhibit in a space generally dedicated to architecture production,proposing the installtions of two monumental structures that question the limits of photography. Installed in two symmetrical spaces over 200 square meters, these two structures imagined by the artist invite the viewer to physically apprehend the images he has collected and of which he assumes their reappropriation.

ART WORK 01 _ GREN HOUSE
The installation Greenhouse stages a series of photographs of sunsets that the artist has accumulated. These images are reproduced in direct printing on the transparent walls of a garden greenhouse. The sunset is one of the most photographed subjects in the world.
This typology of landscape image is logically the most uploaded on image sharing platforms like Flickr. The viewer will be invited to consult within this structure a collection of books, each cover is also illustrated by a sunset.

Aluminum structure and honeycomb polycarbonate sheets printed in direct UV printing.
 

ART WORK 02 _ BLUE CORIDOR
 

The first Blue Corridor installation was initially created in 2017 during Thomas Mailaender’s personal exhibition The Fun Archive at the NRW Forum in Dusseldorf. This is a construction made from about sixty plates of plasterboard, a material used more commonly in construction. These plates were coated with a photosensitive solution and then exposed to UV rays to reproduce images gleaned from the Internet. This technique, more commonly known as Cyanotype, is an archaic photographic process invented in 1842 and which was used until the early 1980s by architects to reproduce their blueprints.

Ba13 plates, aluminum structure and Cyanotype process.