“Retrospective”

Sosoro Museum

21^st Nov – 21^st Dec 2024

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She defines herself as a "War Correspondent, Visual Artist & Writer". The two aspects of her visual practice, which also correspond to two moments of her life, are however linked by several points that can be found in photographs whose aesthetics have nothing to do with each other.

For fifteen years, she has, in black and white, been the woman who has borne witness, throughout the world, to the greatest number of armed conflicts. Her photographs with precise framing and always at the right and respectful distance have been published in the most prestigious press media on the planet. They are the memory of a torn, painful, fractured world. But, unlike many of her colleagues, the one who distinguished herself in Vietnam and Cambodia when she was very young at the same moment of two other French women, Françoise de Mulder and Catherine Leroy, was always more concerned by the situation of civilians in war situations than in the fighting itself. And she always considered women’s situation and position. Her way of telling life in a context of death. As a photojournalist, she was, through her aesthetic demands, also a concerned artist.

Deeply and lastingly marked by the suicide she learned of in 1973 in Saigon of her younger brother Eric, she decided, ten years later, to exorcise this personal tragedy by creating images that would “bring the missing back to life”. She remembers her visits to the Prado Museum in Madrid when she builds colorful compositions, combining black and white portraits of those who were dear to her and objects, flowers, pearls, plants, shimmering fabrics. In this collection that takes her from her family members to Spanish virgins and bullfighters, from the famous singer Maria Callas to the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, the French writer Marguerite Duras occupies a special place. She is, as she says, her idol.

On February 11^th,1974, Christine Spengler photographed the first bombing of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge. She gave a dark vision of the end of the world and the image was published around the world. Fifty years later, this photograph comes back to Cambodia as a testimony of memory and a tribute to a great artist.

 All photos : © Donation Christine Spengler, Ministère de la Culture (France), Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie, diffusion GrandPalaisRmn Photo

Christine Spengler's exhibition is presented at the Musée SOSORO in Phnom Penh.