Izis,
Exhibition at Mairie de Paris, until May, 29, 2010
They were
five, "five French photographers' statements at MoMA in New York in
1951. Doisneau, Brassai, Ronis and Cartier-Bresson, history remembers
the names. Izis, it is more widely misunderstood. A retrospective of
the town hall, Mairie de Paris, which climbed up some 250 photographs,
remins us the forgotten name of Izis. Izraeli Bidermanas, Lithuanian
Jew, becomes Izis in 1941. He is then illegal worker in Paris under
German occupation. "Paris excited my imagination. It was the city of
light. It was the European paradise, like other American." He foams
along banks of the Seine, where he was, he says, go with its
characters. Quai Montebello, Pont au Change, Island du Vert Galant, it
freezes the sleepers, love asleep, exhausted workers, beautiful
abandoned. Under its
camera Paris sleeps, plays, works, loves. But Izis,
Parisian "flâneur", London also surveyed with
Prévert, places dear to him for Colette bring back memories
when she is immobilized. He pulls to match the portraits of Dora Maar,
Eluard and Breton, who wrote: "There has to know that you seize this
moment on the optimum ratio between people and things." Then Chagall,
Iza is only authorized to follow the master during
construction of the ceiling of the Opera Garnier fascinating story that
sees second by second, the wrinkled hands down on paper the first lines
of the female bird. "Gay but constantly sad," said
today his son, Manuel, co-chairman pf the exhibition. For the uprooted
guard, deep wound of exile and the emotional peak in two series: the
kids come to participate in the planting of the Forest of Martyrs in
Israel promised land, and the metamorphosis of the clown Grock in
Dreams circus. Face bare and painted houses in the trailer until the
arrival on stage. Sweet melancholy of the artist.