As part of the Bicentenary celebration of the invention of photography, the Centre des Monuments Nationaux pays tribute to the American photographer Karen Knorr (born in 1954 in Frankfurt, West Germany) through the exhibition No Future, presented across two complementary heritage sites.
At the Château d’Azay-le-Rideau, the artist presents a retrospective of her work devoted to the relationship between dwelling and inhabitant. The works produced in this context deliberately engage with the tradition of Western art, adopting or subverting its codes and conventions. In parallel, the Château d’Oiron presents two series of images, one from the early stages of the artist’s career and the other from her recent practice, allowing viewers to trace the evolution of her photographic language.
The series Punks (1970s), created with Olivier Richon, documents the London underground punk movement, whose followers expressed a style and attitude rooted in disenchantment and nihilism. This sentiment is encapsulated in one of their slogans: “No Future,” which was chosen as the title of the exhibition.
The visual violence of their clothing and attitudes contrasts sharply with the conservative context of British society at the time. To document this counterculture, Karen Knorr and her collaborator went to meet punks in the clubs where they gathered (such as the Roxy and the Global Village). Rather than working covertly with candid shots, Knorr embraced their theatricality and asked them to pose. Portable lighting used on site brought the photographic conditions closer to those of a studio or atelier. The resulting series of analogue photographs renews the classical art of portraiture, in which the subject presents themselves, with pose and composition expressing personality and social identity.
The series Questions (After Brecht), created in 2017–2018, consists of views of deserted industrial sites, where human-absent spaces evoke landscapes of ruins in the making, in a poetics reminiscent of Romantic sensibility. Despite the contemporary nature of their architectural settings, these works remain anchored in the Western artistic tradition. It is above all the digital treatment of the image that brings them closer to easel painting. The ambiguity of the technique and its proximity to painting recall the pictorialist experiments of certain pioneers of photography in the 19th century. Combined with quotations from German playwright and writer Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), deeply marked by the horrors of war, Nazism, and Soviet occupation, the images extend the pessimistic dimension of his questioning.
