Matthieu Humery, despite curating exhibitions showcasing iconic photographers, doesn't confine himself to the conventional curator role. With a psychogeographer's approach, he designs displays and spaces emphasizing the observer's viewpoint. In this interview, he elaborates on his curation style, focusing on three important exhibitions from his career: "Diane Arbus' Constellation," "Henri Cartier-Bresson's Le Grand Jeu," and "Chronorama." Each exhibition is a result of meticulous planning and an intention to redefine art's interaction with its audience.

Matthew Kraus: I’d love to start with what you see as the role of the curator.

Matthieu Humery: It’s a good question. Because I do not really consider myself as a curator. I mean, to make it simple for people, I introduce myself as a curator. But in fact, I do not really consider myself one.

Kraus: It’s fascinating because you’re certainly cited as a curator often.

Humery: Yes, because it’s easier to understand. But what I am attempting to do is interact with this romantic idea of "lifetime achievement." It includes, by and large, almost by definition dead artists with a great "renommée." It is as if I am in the position of a theater director who has to stage a classic piece. It is then that I feel free to bring a new light and deeper understanding to the work. I also like to have the idea come after a sedimentation in order to make the work remian valid, impressive, and interpretive. This is something that is much more difficult to achieve with a living artist. I do them with pleasure, of course, but it’s almost like an entirely different job. It requires a completely different vision. If I do a show like "Chronorama Redux," for instance, then I may consider myself a curator, because I have to assemble contemporary work. But for the primary "Chronorama" show in Venice last year, I do not consider myself a curator so much. It’s more linked to photography as a kind of material I can play with. I can do a sort of construction. It’s more akin to something like scenography, almost more related to architecture—more related to the display, the space, and everything that represents. That’s more important to me than the curation. Some curators focus more on the writings, the thoughts, or critique. And some are more focussed on the display, and how you organize things in the space. So I’m much more focussed on that area.

Scenography of the exhibition “Le grand jeu” by Henri Cartier-Bresson. From April 13, 2021 to August 22, 2021. © Élie Ludwig / BnF

Above and slideshow below: Scenography of the exhibition “Le grand jeu” by Henri Cartier-Bresson. From April 13, 2021 to August 22, 2021. © Élie Ludwig / BnF

Kraus: The space?

Humery: The space, yes, because when I started, I never really wanted to be a curator.

Kraus: So how did you get into curation?

Humery: I wanted to be a director for theater or movie theaters because my father used to work in that business. As a kid, I was lucky enough to go to see some film stages. And in the beginning, after my first degree, I actually attended a well-regarded acting school in France called Cours Florent. I didn’t necessarily want to be an actor, but I wanted to be with actors, so I wound up working a lot with actors more on the direction side, while at the same time studying art history. Then a love of cinema led to me to become fascinated with photography–how you see an image, the way to look at an image, even the process of photography, discovering the early stages of photography in the 18th century. It really was an amazing time and not so different from when people were discovering cinema and film.

Kraus: What wound up being your first job that related to what you do now?

Humery: My first related job was fashion show production—doing the lighting and all the organization. And I did that for quite a long time in the ’90s. And from that I got an opportunity at the auction house, Phillips, primarily working on their catalog. At the time, in 2002, Phillips had been purchased by LVMH, and they needed to think about how the presentation of auction material could be different. And especially with photography, it gives you an opportunity to organize the catalog in a very different way. So I proposed this very large format, something that was very different than what other auction houses were doing at the time. And that approach was so successful with photography that they introduced it into their other categories of art.

Kraus: I remember those catalogs. They might as well have been art books.

Humery: They were super nice. Because what made photography different at the time, was that they were not yet status pieces. It could be an actual art piece you put on the wall. But it was also an image. So the catalog or book could become like a kind of art piece unto itself. So I came to realize that you can play with this, and there is no other medium like this. That, for me, is the wonderful complexity of photography.

Scenography of the exhibition “Le grand jeu” by Henri Cartier-Bresson. From April 13, 2021 to August 22, 2021. © Élie Ludwig / BnF

Kraus: You came to mind as a curator who thinks about art and evolution in a very unique way. With that in mind, I want to look at three very specific shows, "Chronorama" and the companion "Chronorama Redux" (Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy), "Diane Arbus, Constellation" (Luma, Arles, France), and "Henri Cartier-Bresson, Le Grand Jeu" (Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy). With a each of them, you seem to approach the show as more than, as you say, just a presentation of the work. These shows clearly try to say, “We’ve seen this work before. How can we contextualize it somehow in a new or modern or contemporary way?” I want to start with the Cartier-Bresson show at the Palazzo. Can you walk me through the details of how that was conceived? You could have easily said, “This is the collection. We all know it. Let’s all see it in person.” But you decided to do something different.

Humery: Yes, completely different. One could do another monographic show, just as the Cartier-Bresson Foundation and Peter Galassi did in their fantastic show at MoMA in 1987, and Clément Chéroux also did in a fantastic exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2014. But to do another classic Cartier-Bresson show didn’t hold any interest for me and isn’t my vision of the work. That’s the job of a curator. But for me, I had to find a way to present the work that was more organic. How you could present a body of work and explain what it is without being too… How would say?

Kraus: Literal?

You have to organize your mind around an archive as a single entity

Humery: Yes, exactly. The way you present the work, in a way, winds up being the same thing that becomes the perception of the work itself. This body of work was a huge collection of around 385 images that Cartier-Bresson selected himself when he was 72 or 73 years old. And for him, when the foundation and friends asked him to make a selection of his best pictures, he didn’t say yes right away. He had to think about that, and then at some point, he said, “Yes, I will do it.” This process took him a couple of years. And that winds up being a process of looking back, of going back to the archive. And in many ways I love the archive even more than the pictures themselves. It explains so much. He went through the archive and then made a selection of 385 images. So I wanted to approach the show in a way that he was approaching all that work at the time. By then he had essentially decided not to take pictures anymore. For him, drawing had become more important than photography. I think he also realized that photography had changed at this time, with photographers like Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Diane Arbus. He felt like it was maybe time to focus on the work he already produced instead of doing new work. And I think that in itself was quite interesting. In a way, I wanted to translate the idea of what it means to look back and make a selection, really focus on that editing process. I thought that instead of me doing it, I could ask different personalities to do it and organize mini shows within the show. In cinema, you sometimes have this very specific format of having a full-length film made up of several shorter films. So I wanted to have different visions of the work, and each vision to be very specific. And then maybe through those, what turned out to be, five different visions, you might have a better idea of Cartier-Bresson himself. It was a collection that the Pinault Collection acquired at the time. So for the first person, I asked François Pinault, as a collector, to make a selection of between 40 and 60 images and to do his own mini show in a way. And that would be the point of view of a collector. In addition, I could have the point of view of the curator of the museum as a more official voice. So I asked Sylvie Aubenas from the Bibliotheque Nationale of France to do a selection of 40 to 60 images. And then I wanted to have the perspective of a writer, as Bresson himself was always surrounded by and very interested in writers. He had a lot of friends who were writers. So I asked Javier Cercas, a Spanish writer, to make a selection. Additionally, I wanted to have the point of view of the photographer. So I asked Annie Leibovitz, who always claimed that she started photography because of Henri Cartier-Bresson. And as the last point of view I wanted the vision of a movie director. So I asked Wim Wenders, who himself was also a photographer as well as a filmmaker. So I assembled these five different visions and had each of them pick 50 images, more or less, without knowing what the other will pick. And the display, the framing, the lighting would be completely different. So you have these five different visions next to each other, and through that, in a way, you can make a description of what and who Cartier-Bresson is. It becomes more like a show on the perception of Cartier-Bresson than on Cartier-Bresson himself.

Kraus: At the same time, asking them to do what Cartier-Bresson was asked to do with his work.

Humery: That’s exactly the idea. To repeat this process. I gave them all the 385 images and they were each asked to select images without knowing what the other “curators” had picked. So maybe you would have the same image twice, or maybe even three times throughout the entire show, which in itself references the process of Bresson’s selections, as they had made six identical sets of the 385-image edit, giving them to different museums around the world. So if I have duplicate selections, I was able to ask the Cartier-Bresson Foundation and then the Bibliotheque Nationale France, which each own a set, or the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which owns one as well. So I was able to ask for a loan in case you have two or three images—

Kraus: That overlap.

Humery: Exactly. And that was also quite interesting and fascinating—to see the meaning of an image change completely when you see that same image in another context.

Kraus: It’s incredible as well, because it’s almost what you are asking of the person who comes to see the show. You ask them to bring their own aesthetic to whatever they’re viewing in your show. Can you remember anything specific that was interesting about the overlapping selections? Generally speaking, were the overlaps found in the most well-known images?

Humery: Not necessarily. I was looking forward to seeing if I would have a lot of doubles or even triples. And at the end, not so much, and not necessarily the most famous images.

Kraus: That’s interesting. Because you would think, obviously, we all have images in our head that we associate with him.

Humery: And even more incredible, we didn’t have one instance of the same image all five times.

Kraus: That’s fascinating.

Humery: When I organized the show, to start the show, I did not want to say anything to the visitor about the possibility of seeing the same image multiple times. I just explained the rules and premise of the show and that’s the name of the show, “Le Grand or “The Big Game.” And then people realize as they see the first one they’re like, the idea being, “Oh, I’m going to see what François Pinault did and what Annie Leibovitz did.” And then they realized that, “Oh, but I saw this picture again.” But they’re not so sure. They’re confused. But because the context is so different, the meaning of the image is so different.

Kraus: And you presented each person’s selections differently.

Humery: Yeah. I did five different little shows within the show. The lighting was very different. The framing was different. Everything was different.

Kraus: The conceit is wonderful.

Humery: Each “curator” had their own vision and their own display. And then out of that you compose a bigger exhibition.

Previous Spread: Installation view, "Chronorama" at Palazzo Grassi, 2023. Ph. Marco Cappellettii; Opposite: Eric N. Mack, “Sarong,” 2023, Courtesy of the artist, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York and Galleria Franco Noero, Torino.

Kraus: It’s so interesting because with an idea like that, and the other ideas you’ve had that we’ll touch on, it almost seems as though you start with the premise, “How can I reinvent the way we see this body of work?” That makes sense with an archive that we may all be somewhat familiar with. However, that was decidedly not the case with the next show I’d like to talk about, “Chronorama.” The show was so unique in terms of how you presented material that the visitor may not have been at all familiar with. How much are you thinking about the person coming through the exhibition and what associations a person may make in concert with how you’ve presented the images?

Humery: It’s all about the archive. Cartier-Bresson went through his own archive and created this body of work, which is 385 images. It’s almost like a mini archive of what he did for several years. For “Chronorama,” the work represents a very specific and very large archive from Condé Nast. This particular collection that has been presented at the Palazzo Grassi is an extraction of what the Pinault Collection bought from the archive of Condé Nast in New York. It’s several thousands of images— images that could be considered real documents, and not only documents, but in fact real pieces of art. When I discovered how rich this archive was, made out of incredible prints, I thought we needed to do something very specific with that. So to go back to your question, when you are in front of a body of work, you have to organize yourself and your mind around the archive as a single entity. And how can I share that? How can I translate my feelings of me being in front of that in the most intelligible way? It’s really all about that for me. So I realized that it essentially represented a kind of history of the 20th century. You need to find a system, and the system here was to organize this by decades. With Cartier-Bresson there were a lot of different images you can group together. That idea was much more about focusing on a singular vision of a person. But that’s not the case with “Chronorama.” It’s a collection of images by 185 different photographers. It’s not one vision, but multiple visions. A lot of the images are from the 1910s, the ‘20s, the ‘30s, the ‘40s, and different styles of prints. They’re all different. So you have to organize this in a very specific way. And this is how I envisioned the ‘line’—I thought presenting in a line could serve as a guide. And just like from one year to the next, you might not see how things progress. But after 10 years, you might come to realize, “Oh, yeah, things really change.” So I wanted to translate that feeling that we have all experienced. If you see someone every day, you don’t see a change. But if you don’t see them for a couple of months or a couple of years, then you can’t believe how much has in fact changed. So I wanted people to see that things are moving slowly, but surely, and in that you have this evolution. You may have your own vision of the ‘20s or the ‘30s or the ‘60s or the ‘70s. You have your own baggage. And knowing that people have that, you just need use what people think they know. And this you can play with.

Installation view, "Chronorama Redux" at Palazzo Grassi, 2023. Ph. Marco Cappelletti © Palazzo Grassi

Kraus: So you very much have the viewer in mind.

Humery: Absolutely.

Kraus: That’s almost a fourth dimension that you have to take into consideration. And presenting in a continuous line is such a specific choice as opposed to forcing associations through groupings or what could be considered a more graphic or thematic presentation.

Humery: Exactly. Because the show was organized by decades, and within the decades, you have year-by-year. So there is a narrative. It’s very important to find the story. What is the story about? It’s the story of the 20th century, the story of photography, the story of architecture, the story of fashion, of everything is the 20th century represents.

Kraus: What makes “Chronorama” so interesting with regard to what we were discussing earlier, about modernizing the context of older work, is what you did with the “Redux” portion of the show. I remember first hearing about the concept, and it was very hard to imagine, especially when you talked about the mediums in which these artists would be working.

Humery: Yes. The idea was to have a show within the show. That’s why I called it “Chronorama Redux,” meaning ‘redoing’—it could have easily been called “Resurrection.” So I wanted to make sure that, among an archive that clearly belongs to the past, people could discover history, they could discover fashion. And, as the Pinault Collection is also a collection of contemporary art, I wanted to have this vision of a younger generation that is not really necessarily linked directly to this work to see how they might assimilate it. How do they perceive this work? How can they use this work or translate the feeling of this work? So that’s why I thought it would be great to make some space without breaking the line, but instead, in-between to give some free space where you could see some of the images being rethought, being re-treated, being reused…

Kraus: Being re imagined.

Humery: Yes, exactly—re imagined through their own process.

Kraus: Tell me about the artists that you chose and how they related to the work.

Humery: So there is, out of the four, two male and two female artists. One was a photographer. But she’s not only a photographer. Tarrah Krajnak is from Los Angeles, and she is also a performer. So I thought it was quite interesting to have the vision of photographer who also does performances, and her work also deals a lot with archives. And then a painter who also uses images as a background and then transforms those images into something completely different. And I thought that was quite interesting. This was the painter Daniel Spivakov, a Ukrainian artist. And then also I wanted to have the vision of a sculptor. So I chose Eric Mack, from New York. And looking at the photographs, he would get inspired by the subject itself, working with fabrics and forms. And the last one was a painter from Venice living in Paris, Giulia Andreani. Her process is interesting because she’s a painter and she paints from photography, but she reverses the values. The positive becomes negative and the negative becomes positive. And what’s interesting about her work, is she cannot repaint. It’s a technical fresco, and once you do it, if you do it wrong, then, that’s it. You cannot redo it.

Kraus: And in bringing these contemporary artists to work with this archival material, some of it more than 100 years old, was it all about just showing that this work moves through history even into the future?

I wanted people to see that things are moving slowly, but surely, and in that you have this evolution

Humery: I really picked each of them for a very specific reason, knowing that they wouldn’t be coming to the work with even a basic first-degree translation, using an image or the image itself. It was completely free in that way. Being able to reuse images or to be inspired by images on different levels. That winds up illustrating the impact of an archive on its heritage more than anything that can be accomplished by simply displaying the work.

Kraus: It feels as though on many levels, you’re showing not just an evolution through the historical work, but to say it can evolve through interpretation or interpolation.

Humery: That is exactly right. The idea was to have two distinct lines. The first one was a more classical, more academic, where you understand the evolution of the 20th century and you learn how things change. Something that more represents the work’s historical context. And then another level is linked to the freedom of conception. And by putting these two approaches next to each other you see how they can exist at the same time.

Installation view, "Diane Arbus, Constellation," TheTower, Main Gallery, LUMA Arles, France. All artworks © The Estate of Diane Arbus Collection Maja Hoffmann / LUMA Foundation. Photo © Adrian Deweerdt

Kraus: The other show I want to talk about is “Diane Arbus: Constellation.” Talk a little bit about what that body of work represents and how you used space in that show.

Humery: “Constellation” is an exhibition of about 350 images. So, again, it’s a lot. I don’t think any Diane Arbus show has shown as many pictures at once. I think usually it has been around 200 images or so. So there was something between 150 and 200 images in “Constellation” that havn’t been seen before. They all came from Neil Selkirk, who was a printer in the ’70s. In 1973, to be precise, he started to print for the posthumous exhibition retrospective of Diane Arbus that Marvin Israel organized at the MoMA. I think a good portion, maybe half or 40%, of the show images have been printed by Neil Selkirk. And Neil Selkirk met Diane Arbus when she gave a master class. It was then she saw that Neil had good technique as both a printer and a photographer. And after the show that Marvin Israel started to put in place at the MoMA, I think the estate decided to make images Arbus never got to print when she was alive. She had made quite a few small prints she would for herself. She would pin them on the wall most of the time. And they decided maybe what would be great, would be to print every print she had ever selected. So Neil was able to use the same exact photographic printer that Arbus used. And as it turns out, she liked a kind of darker print. So even if it’s not really what he would have done, he really did the print the way she saw it.

Kraus: Remaining respectful of her style.

Humery: Exactly. He always said that one wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between his print and Diane’s own print. That was his goal. So, I think, for decades, they decided to print all of those images, and he kept one print for himself. And I think it was around the early 2000s when they decided to stop. I think they had done everything they could. Then the LUMA Foundation made this acquisition of what was essentially this Neil Selkirk set of prints of Diane Arbus. And again, I thought that it would be really amazing to see all these images all together. But how could one even do this? Because Diane Arbus’s body of work has so many different themes, what could be the possible arrangement? What I knew was that I didn’t want to organize by theme. It’s been done. To me it would be boring. And with that you’re going to get some repetition. You also cannot just have a white wall and group them in chronological order. It would be nonsense. Also to consider was that she started to take pictures in a small format, 36 mm, and then she moved a larger format, six by six. So I think, yeah, but I’m not going to have all the small format first and the six by six after. That would also be super boring. And then again, I thought how I could find a solution to translate this archive, just like the way I did with the others before. And I was in New York reading a book called Diane Arbus: A Chronology. It’s a book about all the writing she had ever done. And I was in the subway. And then at some point, I saw the subway map. And reading the book and looking at the map of the subway, I thought, “That’s the solution. I should organize the show within a grid like this with some structures. And images should be displayed the way she might have moved around to photograph them.” So, looking at the map of the subway, I said, “Okay.” I put myself in the place of being Diane Arbus walking around in New York—Washington Square, Central Park—and taking pictures of people she doesn’t know. She would take a picture of those people and move to the next scene. So I think, okay, how could I repeat this, and in a way, have the visitors looking around the show the way she used to walk around in the city?

Kraus: Essentially wandering similarly through the material.

Humery: Exactly. And I thought, “That’s a solution.” You could start from wherever you want, finish wherever you want, and you do your own show. And also, I thought it could be great to have those images floating in the air and not having them at the same level everywhere. So that’s exactly the way I organized things. Sometimes you really need to look down, sometimes you really have to look up, and if you don’t see them very well, that’s not a problem. It’s like in real life. Looking at the images as Arbus herself may have had to look for the image to take. And I asked after a couple of months how much time people stayed in the exhibition and people stayed almost an hour because you can go back from where you come from. There was a complete freedom.

Kraus: And you might very well discover something different, even when revisiting the same image.

Humery: To discover is the idea. And aside from that, of course, you have wall text explaining the rules, how you should navigate this exhibition, just in a way, to give you the freedom to look at the images the way you want because sometimes you need to say to people, “Don’t be afraid. Really look at the pictures.” And then another text from Neil Selkirk explaining what these images are so you would know what you are looking for. That’s it. And then you have numbers with a little brochure in case you need to know the title. But most of the time, titles for images from Diane Arbus are pure description, just like the year. So you would have all the essential information in case you need it. But the essence of the show is confronting images the way you want without any other information.

Kraus: Again, asking the viewer to put themselves in the place of the artist. There was always a lot of psychology that existed almost like a veneer in her work. The structure of the exhibition brings to life the idea of wandering through the hallways of her mind as she made the images.

Humery: That was also a good reason for me not forcefully going into this psychology with additional information because in the end there are around 450 images. And if you have to go through the psychology of 450 images, it’s an endless process. I didn’t want to do that. Of course, I think there are times when it’s good to guide and to explain with writing, with texts, which was the case with “Chronorama,” where there is a lot of text. And people loved reading those texts because then when you look at images you can think about those images in a very different way. But in this case, it’s the other way around. The experience can illustrate the idea. It’s very important that each exhibition has its own way. And I think in this case, it was more important to give the full freedom for visitors to interact with the pictures the way they want.

Kraus: And the space. There is room to explore and you’re using the physical environment as another character in the presentation of the material.

Humery: Absolutely. As a matter of fact, in the back of the space for “Constellation,” I placed a full-length mirror, which you do not necessarily realize right away. It looks like it’s a never-ending exhibition on the other side. And then you just realize at some point that no, it’s actually a reflection of the existing space. And also, for me, it was quite interesting to have a kind of clin d’oeil because Diane did a lot of pictures in and around the circus. And so the mirror, also comes to represent something like—

Kraus: A fun house?

it is very important to find the story. what is the story about?

Humery: Exactly. I think the reflection is very important because the show is a portrait of her. And you are part of the picture, so it’s a portrait of yourself too. She herself is part of the show. I wanted to define Diane Arbus through this entire body of work—an entire body of work of 454 images floating like this in the air. You can see all this in the mirror. And that single reflected image becomes a portrait of her made out of all these images. We are all like this. When we think about our own life, we have images coming and going from the past. We dream in images. You think about the time you are 20 years old, and if you see an image representing that time, you are put right back into your memories. Your memories are linked to those images, for all of us. And this is what I wanted to reproduce in a way, to realize, “Okay, these are her memories, but by me doing this, through this process of walking around, I create new memories.”

Kraus: I’ve always felt it’s as if she has always asked us to see ourselves in her work. And through the structure of the show, including of course the mirrored wall, you’ve said, “Now you can actually see yourself in her work.”

Humery: That’s exactly right. So it wasn’t just a gimmicky thing. It was very important to me for the visitor to not necessarily realize right away what the meaning was, and then to come to realize that it was a reflection, and that in that reflection was your own portrait as well.

Kraus: In all of these shows we’ve been discussing, you are asking people to see themselves in the work in different ways.

Humery: Exactly. And in the end that is why I choose to not characterize myself as a curator. I think it’s essentially that I don’t want to be the only one who is explaining the work. I want to give the opportunity to others to be part of the process. To me, there is no better way to understand things, to understand images.

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