Tips > Curate a Pairing

The Bather (c. 1885)

Paul Cézanne

Museum of Modern Art

Odessa, Ukraine, August 4, 1993

Rineke Dijkstra

Guggenheim Museum

The Museum of Modern Art paired Paul Cézanne's The Bather with Odessa, Ukraine, 4 August 1993, a photograph by the Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra.

Here's what two pundits wrote about the juxtaposition.

The pairing is a neat demonstration of how a single classic pictorial motif can recur, which is nice to see, in a textbooky way.

Holland Cotter

New York Times, October 8, 1999

For as long as I can remember, Cézanne's The Bather, a painting of a young man or boy posed in the act of stepping forward, has hung near the opening of MOMA's permanent collection.

It has always been surrounded by other Post-Impressionist works from the period.

Its message has been, in part, Here modern art itself seems to step forward, in the unfolding of style that you will see in the succeeding rooms.

In "ModernStarts," the curators have juxtaposed this iconic painting with a photograph taken more than a century later, Rineke Dijkstra's Odessa, Ukraine, 4 August 1993.

The photograph shows a young boy standing on a beach in a pose similar to that of the boy in the Cézanne.

Both images have a flat, detached aura.

But the Cézanne retains the density of nineteenth-century painting, whereas the Dijkstra has the deadpan color and -- in the expression of the boy -- the strange mixture of naïveté and sophistication typical of contemporary culture.

To see this Cézanne fast-forwarded seems to deliver a shock to time itself.

And afterward, both periods -- his and ours -- appear enlivened.

Mark Stevens

New York Magazine, October 18, 1999

Do the Following

Pair one of your photographs with another work.

The other work can be anything—photograph, painting, sculpture, and so forth.

The pairing can be based on anything.

For example, compare the tent, content, and intent of pairings of your work.

These categories are broad, they overlap, and they don't encompass everything.

But, they're a good start.

Tent

The tent contains:

• Performers

Performers can be the label of a genre, idea, a philosophy, and so forth.

For example, a pairing could be of two photographs that are performing photojournalism.

• Audience

The audience is who the photographer was "working for," and who was expected to be looking at the photographs.

The audience could be the photographer, family, camera club members, posterity, or ?

Content

The content is the subject, composition, lighting, color, tone, mood, them, and so forth.

Intent

The intent is what the photographer intended the photograph to communicate, to represent, to activate, to change, and so forth.

Tip

Be sure to look at the two images, side-by-side, when you're thinking about them.