Lisa Oppenheim: Monsieur Steichen: Lët’z Arles, La Mécanique Generale, LUMA, Arles, France

Working across photography, textiles, and floral compositions, Lisa Oppenheim offers a subjective and abstract portrait of one of the most renowned figures of twentieth-century photography: the Luxembourg-born American photographer and curator Edward Steichen (1879–1973).

For Monsieur Steichen, Oppenheim explores the latent possibilities of photography, focusing on lesser-known aspects of Steichen’s practice: his lifelong passion for flowers, his textile designs, and his experiments in color photography. The artist composes from Steichen’s “lost threads”: “I plan to do with his work what he did throughout his own life: ingest and reconstitute a wide range of practices and ideas,” explains Oppenheim.

Using two techniques from different eras: dye-transfer printing, used by Steichen in his 1930s–40s color experiments, and artificial intelligence, Lisa Oppenheim brings back to life a now-extinct iris, named “Monsieur Steichen” and created in 1910 by French botanist Fernand Denis. AI is employed to generate “hypothetical hybrids” by merging images of the two irises originally combined to create the flower. The generated images are then transformed through dye transfer, exploiting the successive imbibition of cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes to disrupt both genetic and photographic verisimilitude.

Another body of work revisits the textile patterns created by Steichen in 1926–27 for the silk manufacturer Stehli Silks. In collaboration with fashion designer Zoe Latta, Lisa Oppenheim has developed eight new fabrics based on photographs made by Steichen of motifs that were never translated into textiles. The resulting works evoke electronic interference and microscopic organic forms.

The exhibition also includes Steichen Studies, which combine archival photographs and darkroom experiments, as well as the floral composition Bouquet of Flowers (a photographic score), which evolves throughout the exhibition.

Lisa Oppenheim invites us to reimagine the image as an endlessly transformative medium through her explorations of hybridization—between techniques, disciplines, and artistic practices.