LAUSANNE.- This exhibition looks back over the life’s work of Jan Groover (1943-2012), the American photographer whose personal collection was added to the Musée de l’Elysée’s collections in 2017. Based on a selection of archives from her personal collections, the exhibition evokes not only the artist’s years in New York but also her years in France – a less known part of her career. With the will to enrich research on Jan Groover, the exhibition displays the first results of the considerable work on the collection conducted by the museum - from the perspective both of conservation as well as historical documentation.

Formalism is everything
Taking Jan Groover’s statement as a guiding principle, the exhibition highlights the eminently plastic design pursued by the photographer throughout her career. Conducted in a spirit of endless experimentation, this research and the creative process it involves are emphasised not only by the presentation of early tests and experiments but also by the inclusion of unique documents, notes and preparatory notebooks.

In the early 1970s, abandoning her earlier vocation as a painter, Jan Groover began to attract attention with her photographic polyptychs constructed around the motifs of the road, cars and the urban environment. As the early stages of her formal and aesthetic explorations, they offer an opportunity to re-examine the reflections initiated at the time by the conceptual trend (especially with regard to notions of seriality and sequence).

By 1978, Jan Groover had radically changed subject, turning to still life. She embarked on pictures that were to form the main body of her work and thanks to which she remains to this day one of the eminent figures of the genre. Mostly created in her studio, her compositions use a variety of processes. In the 1980s, they actively contributed to the recognition of colour photography. Despite the indisputable pre-eminence of her photographs of objects, Jan Groover’s work is also studded with landscapes, bodies and portraits, often in monochrome. She developed a keen interest in the technique of platinum and palladium, which she studied in greater depth when she arrived in France, with several series in a very specific elongated format (banquet camera) concluding the exhibition.

The conservation of the Groover fonds
The Jan Groover archive is one of those rare cases where the body of work to be preserved can be shown alongside its environment of origin (in this case the artist’s studio and lab). Furthermore, there are few collections that are able to be apprehended in their entirety like this one [...]. Having remained practically untouched since the artist’s death in 2012, the Jan Groover archive is particularly distinct in this respect. Covering all of the artist’s work, from the purchase of her first camera (1967) to her final digital prints (around 2011), it has preserved almost all of the original negatives and corresponding prints. The photographer’s own original classification system has also been maintained. A summary inventory initially tallied a total of 11,633 negatives, 525 slides on transparencies, as well as 9,485 photographic and paper prints.

Among this profusion of images, two bodies of work distinguish themselves in a remarkable way: one revolving around color processes, the second surrounding the platinum and palladium techniques.

The first set corroborates the importance attributed to Jan Groover in the history of color photography. However, preserving it has turned out to be relatively complex. The color paper prints and instant prints show irreversible deterioration in color intensity [...].

The second set, comprising platinum and palladium prints, shows the very special interest the artist developed in that old process, which was popular from the late 19th century until the First World War. This choice was surprising in a period when color prints dominated ninety percent of the market. However, it did not surprise Susan Kismaric who, in the introduction to the catalogue for the Jan Groover MoMA exhibition in 1987, recalled the atmosphere of experimentation peculiar to the 1970s. When she arrived in France, Jan Groover dedicated herself almost exclusively to this technique, producing elongated, large-format works. Although platinum and palladium prints are quite rare in museum collections (probably because they are quite expensive), the Jan Groover archive includes a sizeable number of them.