“There was a time when the modern man thought that he was making objects,” says François Cheval. “Now the homo faber, as a model, is disappearing in favour of the homo consumer.”
Cheval is curator of the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in France, but he also co-curated the lead exhibition at this year’s Lianzhou Foto Festival with Wang Chunchen, head of the department of curatorial research at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum. Titled As Entertaining As Possible, the show explores the spectacle of consumerism, and the way in which images have “have transformed the individual into a privileged witness to his own alienation”, says Cheval.
Including nearly 20 artists, As Entertaining As Possible includes Maurice Durville’s America 60 series, photographs of the United States in the 1960s, and Jacob Nzudie & Jean-Luc Cramatte’s Supermarket project, which shows people posing among aisles of goods in Yaoundé, Cameroon.
The exhibition also features work from Max Siedentopf’s Funny Money, which was shot this year. A white Namibian now living in the Netherlands, Siedentopf returned to his home country with €100 in local currency, and asked people if he could photograph them. He let them react to the camera as they pleased, and told the locals to name their price if they wanted to be paid – his only specification that the money would be part of the picture.
“Debi showed the brutal reality of the world of merchandise and its desire to bring everything back to the same scale of values,” says Cheval.
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