Director of CLEM, an association recognized for public utility and general interest / Head of the Stéréopôle project / Coordinator of the scientific committee around the Stereoscopic Images project

Catherine Carponsin-Martin has been working since her doctorate in history and archeology on the management of documentary masses. As part of her thesis, she created a database and computerized a corpus of over 90,000 items.

Since 2016, she has been working on the Stéréothèque and Stéréopôle project: reflection around well-defined semantic entities (place, character, type of architecture, event, environment, object, etc.) which accompany the images and make it possible to establish a thematic classification.

 

A heritage to be preserved and valued: the universe of stereoscopic images. Reflections on the Stereopole and the Stereothèque (method and challenges).

Since 2016, the CLEM associated with Archéovision (CNRS unit), has been working on stereoscopy by developing Le Stéréopôle (https://imagestereoscopiques.com/) and La Stéréothèque (https://www.stereotheque.fr/accueil). These interfaces constitute a skills unit that is unique in France on 19th century stereoscopic images, processed with 21st century technologies and made available to research and the public.

As part of the project we have developed, more than 25,000 stereoscopic photographs have been digitized and a large processing chain has been modeled in order to produce a Stereothèque database and a Stéréopôle interface. Our goal is to constitute a national reference base. To achieve this, we have developed a reasoned program for digitization, uploading, collaborative indexing and long-term preservation of the data produced. To date, the Stéréothèque, regularly enriched with new collections, gives access to nearly 13,000 stereoscopic pairs. The Stéréopôle, for its part, corresponds to an interface hosting editorial content related to our subject of study: biographical information on publishers and/or photographers, their period of activity, their published series, distribution networks for stereoscopic photographs. It also makes it possible to distribute educational materials and tools and to submit a new collection. The project also raises the question of how to format this abundant material to make it accessible to different communities of users (specialists, historians, archivists, local authorities, schools, etc.)

The creation of this important base of stereoscopic photographs thus offers the opportunity to develop research work on the image, considered as a source, object of study and transmission of historical knowledge and heritage memory.

Manuel Vason’s artistic practice explores the relationship between photography and performance, presence and representation. He considers the capturing of a moment as an act of creation, a ritual towards the illusion of immortality, and an exchange between who is in front and who is behind the camera. The collaborative nature of his practice shapes a unique, hybrid art form and generates new vocabularies. His collaborations to date have produced some of the most iconic images of performance and his work has been published and presented internationally.

Vason was born in Padua, Italy in 1974. He became interested in photography while working in a black and white professional darkroom. After having assisted some of the most celebrated fashion photographers of his generation in Milan, New York, Paris, London and Los Angeles, he pursued a Masters degree in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. Double Exposures is Vason’s fifth book. It follows Oh Lover Boy! (2001), a two-year collaboration with artist Franko B; Exposures (2002), exploring the body in Live Art; Encounters (2007), which complemented his first solo exhibition at Arnolfini, Bristol; and Still Image Moving a self published project commissioned by In Between Time Festival (2010). In 2012 he presented STILL_MÓVIL, a traveling exhibition of  ‘co-creations’ with 45 choreographers from South America. In 2014 he launched the Double Exposures book project at The Photographers Gallery and Tate Britain in London. In 2015, Vason received a grant from Arts Council England for his latest project titled The PhotoPerformer. Vason continues to develop a practice that integrates different media and forms of collaboration.

Notable projects

The PhotoPerformer (2014 – on going): is the name of Vason’s alter-ego. The aim of this project is to merge photography and performance into an hybrid crosspractice through which to further expose, deconstruct and transform his predominant, white, male, privileged perspective. Double Exposures (2012 – 2015): is a new collaborative venture between Manuel Vason and forty-five of the most visually arresting artists working with performance in the UK. For Double Exposures, Vason has worked with two groups of artists, using two distinct types of collaboration, to produce a series of diptychs. Becoming an Image (2013 – on going): Becoming an Image is Vason’s first body of work, which rather than emerging from a series of collaborations with individual artists, develops out of a group environment, in which Vason leads collaborative actions. The point of departure is the concept of the ‘Art of Exchange’. The images produced become a skin with which to cover surfaces and three-dimensional objects.I Believe in (2010 – on going): I believe in is an ongoing project exploring faith as an agent for artistic creation. The project focuses on the liminal space between the fictional and the real, the virtual and the performed fantasy. STILL_MOVIL (2008 – 2011): STILL_MOVIL is Manuel Vason’s first collection of cocreations with 45 choreographers, dancers and movement practitioners. Working with artists across South America the project explores stillness as a durational space in which choreographed movements translate into poses. Each image was conceived as a new contemporary dance piece. Encounters (2002 – 2007): Encounters is Manuel Vason’s second extensive collection of photographic collaborations with artists working in Performance. Through extensive dialogue-based modes of collaboration, beautifully stylized and vividly constructed images question relations and boundaries between the documentation and artwork, body and space, time and memory. Exposures (2000 – 2002): Exposures is Manuel Vason’s first collection of collaborative photographs with nineteen of the most acclaimed and controversial practitioners in Britain in the early 2000s: artists who were disrupting the norm, breaking the rules and provoking debate by exposing the body in all its diversities, difficulties and desires. Live Gallery (1999 – 2003): is Manuel Vason’s first project which led him to transform a photographic session into a public performance. A site-specific project, which took place within different communities and locations and provoked members of the public to perform an action in front a 10 x 8 inches Polaroid camera. The resultant images where immediately displayed as a temporary exhibition.

Unframing Photography

In this talk Manuel Vason will focus on the vital tension between the act and its image, the visible and the frames we construct to acknowledge it. He will suggest a practice and understanding of photography as a gesture aimed to identify its partiality, its superficiality, its persuasive power and its seductive ability to control. In his opinion photography urges a more critical use and stand to expand its potentiality.

Researcher at the foundation Agencia Aragonesa para la Investigación y el Desarrollo (ARAID) at the University of Zaragoza. Doctor of Art History (2002), he has also been a research fellow of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Academy of Spain in Rome (1996) and researcher of the Ramón y Cajal Program in the Higher School of Architecture at the University of Alcalá de Henares (2003-2008). Since 2008 he has been accredited by ANECA as University Professor and in 2010 he obtained the Favorable Certification of the I3 Program, granted by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Exhibition curator and author of numerous books and articles, he dedicates his research work to the recovery, study and appreciation of the historical photographic heritage (1839-1939).

Piedra Monastery (Saragossa) in commercial stereoscopic photography, 19th and 20th centuries

The Cistercian Piedra Monastery and its landscape are currently one of the most important tourist assets in the province of Zaragoza, in Spain. After its confiscation between 1835 and 1837, its subsequent conversion into a guesthouse attracted numerous and illustrious visitors, as well as painters and photographers, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Since then, the picturesque beauty of the Piedra River waterfalls generated the production and commercialization of numerous albums and collections of photographic views. Among the formats sold with greatest success, stand out the series of stereoscopic photographs, made and put on sale, from the 1860s, by prestigious photographers such as Jean Laurent, Mariano Júdez or, by the beginning of the 20th century, by the firms Fernández and González, Sociedad Estereoscópica Española, Rellev and El Turismo Práctico. The commercial success of stereoscopic photography was such that this format survived commercially until the 1950s and 1960s, the era of plastic, with two collections of 3-D color slides about the monastery, marketed by the companies Arpa Color S.A. and Stereofilm, respectively.