Winner of the Prix de Photographie 2011 Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière-Académie des Beaux-Arts, Françoise Huguier is presenting until November 25, at the Institut de France, "Vertical / Horizontal, Intérieur / Extérieur. Singapour – Kuala Lumpur – Bangkok".

This vast project, begun in 2010, is a study of the middle classes in Southeast Asia. It was an idea inspired by Serge Daney during a trip to Japan, as she reported in an interview with La lettre de l'Académie des Beaux-Arts: “Serge had foreseen the globalization, in the coming decades, of this social class, of its poor taste and loss of cultural identity. I could see the beginnings of these phenomena several years ago when I visited Southeast Asia.”

Françoise Huguier decided to study three cities: Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, “where the same ethnic communities co-exist (in different proportions): Chinese, Malay and Tamil. I photographed families belonging to the middle class which, although it is the bases of the society, generally goes unnoticed...” Invisible, maybe, but the middle class does represent a majority, and a fragile and hypothetical link between these multicultural and multi-ethnic societies specific to the history of these three countries.

Architecturally, the narrowness of its territory led Singapore to build upward, with a forest of homogeneous towers. In contrast, Bangkok is horizontal, with small, standardized houses surrounding the city.

Kuala Lumpur, situated between these two , appears as, “the crucible of the modes of urbanization and social development. Kuala Lumpur is like Bangkok for its more chaotic urban configuration and southern atmosphere [...] Chinese, Tamil and Indians form the bulk of the middle classes [...] Together they amount to a flamboyant Bollywood film set.”

Françoise Huguier has produced a work of memory, “a vision for future generations.” The series is in the vein of documentary photography, but she prefers to consider it a work of photojournalism, “telling the story of a society in depth. It is a sociological and photographic work which leads the viewer to question the influences of governments and the issues of today’s society. What worries me the most is this generation loss of its culture.”

The exhibition includes fifty color prints divided into coherent series, sorts of narrative mini-sequences.

In addition to this exhibition, Actes Sud is publishing a volume devoted to Huguier in its prestigious Photo Poche collection. We see that before the exploration of Asia, her investigations brought her to Africa and post-Soviet Russia.

Bernard Perrine
Bernard.Perrine1@orange.fr

Exhibition :

Françoise Huguier
"Vertical / Horizontal, Intérieur / Extérieur.
Singapour – Kuala Lumpur – Bangkok"
Until November 25th, 2012
Palais de l'Institut de France
Salle Comtesse de Caen
27 quai de Conti
75006 Paris - France
Tuesday - Sunday 11am - 6pm

Publications

"Vertical / Horizontal, Intérieur / Extérieur.
Singapour – Kuala Lumpur – Bangkok"
Photographs by Françoise Huguier
Texts by Michel Crépu and Magali Jauffret
Édition La revue des deux mondes / Hors série
48 pages, 36 photographs

Françoise Huguier
Introduction of Gérard Lefort
Éditions Actes Sud
Collection Photo poche N°142
97 photographs
144 pages, 12,5 x 19,1 cm