Among the many outstanding shows at this yr’s Paris Picture was one by the MUUS Assortment which traced a lineage of inventive evolution throughout two generations of photographers. Wanting Out, Wanting In: Larry Fink and Rosalind Fox Solomon with Lisette Mannequin positioned the work of Fink (1941-2023) and Solomon (1930-2025), whose archives are owned by MUUS, in dialogue with that of their trainer, the pioneering Austrian-born photographer Lisette Mannequin (1901-83).
The MUUS Assortment, which is a associate of the truthful, is a US-based organisation that acquires and develops photographic archives. Since its founding by Michael W. Sonnenfeldt, MUUS has centered on buying the estates of under-examined artists—amongst them Fink’s and Solomon’s, which had been acquired in 2024 and 2021 respectively—and reworking them by way of preservation, analysis, exhibitions and publications. Its holdings additionally embrace Deborah Turbeville, Alfred Wertheimer and André de Dienes. MUUS doesn’t personal any of Mannequin’s work, together with the prints on show on this exhibition; they had been featured due to the French gallery baudoin lebon in a collaborative effort to focus on the significance of the photographer’s work as an image-maker and trainer.
A photograph of Lisette Mannequin herself at Brassai’s Marlborough Gallery opening in New York by Rosalind Fox Solomon (1976) © Rosalind Fox Solomon / MUUS Assortment
Anne E. Havinga, the curator of images on the Museum of Wonderful Arts, Boston, organised the presentation. She sees the exhibition as a chance to underscore the pedagogical in addition to the aesthetic legacies of Mannequin, who taught at New York’s New College for Social Analysis from 1951 and profoundly formed the outlook of her college students. “Mannequin’s instructing prioritised private imaginative and prescient and artistic independence,” Havinga says. “By intense private mentorship, she transmitted her deep fascination with human psychology and the variety of human expertise to her college students.”
Mannequin believed that “images begins with the projection of the photographer, his understanding of life and himself into the image”. Her classes had been philosophical quite than technical. That method is made seen within the methods her college students developed. Fink, finest identified for his collection documenting events, political occasions and jazz golf equipment, sought to seize what he referred to as “the breath and life” of his topics. He credited Mannequin with instructing him to pursue the “power, the heart beat of issues”.
Larry Fink’s Profit, The Museum of Fashionable Artwork New York, NY, June 1976 (1976) © Larry Fink / MUUS Assortment
Solomon, who solely started photographing in her late 30s, additionally present in Mannequin a trainer who inspired her to face her personal anxieties and sensibilities. Solomon’s generally unsettling portraits reveal what she described as “what’s most deeply felt but typically unstated”. Her dying earlier this yr lends the Paris Picture presentation an elegiac tone: the exhibition is devoted partially to her reminiscence.
Every of those photographers used the digicam to pursue a type of social inquiry. Havinga says that Mannequin “profoundly formed her college students, giving them the boldness to {photograph} fearlessly. However these college students in flip developed impartial voices, guaranteeing that her teachings had been refracted into new contexts.”
The presentation comes amid a broader resurgence of consideration to Mannequin. Alongside the MUUS show in Paris, Vienna’s Albertina museum is staging a serious exhibition of her work, and the London-based writer Mack is making ready a brand new quantity this autumn.
For MUUS, exhibiting at Paris Picture is a part of a deliberate technique to embed its holdings within the wider public consciousness. It’s also a reminder that archives should not solely repositories of the previous but additionally energetic websites of interpretation. In Paris, MUUS’s stand provided guests an opportunity to see how a trainer’s philosophy echoed by way of the work of two of her most gifted college students, and the way these legacies are being formed once more for the following technology of lens-based artists.
