Rice student’s Paris work to be featured at Fotofest exhibit

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

Jones College senior Hallie Jordan is following in the footsteps of a giant. She won a grant to study the famous French photographer Eugene Atget last summer in France and shot images at the exact locations he had more than a hundred years ago.

Jordan’s work, “Days & Nights in Paris: In the Footsteps of Atget,” will be on display at Fotofest, Houston’s biennial photography festival, beginning March 8 in the main gallery at the Rice Media Center. Jordan will discuss her work at an opening reception at 5 p.m.

French photographer Eugene Atget's original photo, left. Jones College senior Hallie Jordan's digital version, right.

“Atget’s pictures, made with a large, tripod-mounted view camera on glass photographic plates, are universally admired by documentary and pictorial photographers alike,” said photographer Geoff Winningham, professor of visual arts at Rice. “His work is regarded as the benchmark for documentary photographic study.

“The project she pursued might seem overambitious — particularly for an undergraduate student with a month’s time to work — had she not carried it out with such determination, skill and talent.”

Jordan, an English major, was awarded a Focus Europe Summer Research Fellowship in spring 2011 that allowed her to travel to Paris and work for a month. Using Google maps and copies of Atget’s century-old photographs, Jordan shadowed the French master, working day and night for four weeks and shooting thousands of images with her hand-held digital camera.

She assembled her show largely as a series of diptychs suggesting two-page spreads from a book. She paired one of her color photographs with a monochrome Atget image of the same street, the same building or a scene from the same Parisian park.

“Hallie points out that she is not ‘re-photographing Atget,’ as other photographers have done in recent years,” Winningham said. “That is, she has not tried to photograph Atget subjects from the same angle in the same light; instead, she has responded to Atget’s timeless pictures with new photographs of Paris today. In the process, she has found a visual style of her own, and she has produced pictures that I suspect even Atget would have admired.”

The exhibit is free and open to the public. It will be on display through March 23. For information, contact Rachel Boyle at 713-348-4882 or rboyle@rice.edu.