LILLE.- The Institut pour la photographie, Lille, is currently holding its inaugural cultural programme, extraORDINARY: Photographic perspectives on everyday life, which is open until 15 December 2019.

Seven exhibitions, an installation open to the public, as well as events and experimental workshops, cover the history of photography from the end of the 19th century to today. This new programme reflects different photographic approaches and styles, with a selection of works from around the world that explore everyday life and its banality.

Throughout her career, photographer Lisette Model never ceased to affirm the importance of the individual perspective, in both her work and her teaching. The Institut pour la photographie pays tribute to her with a new exhibition bringing together four great figures of American photography who were inspired by her work: Leon Levinstein, Diane Arbus, Rosalind Fox Solomon and Mary Ellen Mark.

Since 2017, Laura Henno has immersed herself in the lost city of Slab City in the heart of the Californian desert. The Institute supports the artist, who comes from the region of Lille, with the production of previously unpublished prints for this new exhibition project Radical Devotion.

Thomas Struth gives us a glimpse of our relationship to everyday life through a documentary approach that is carefully crafted to reveal the complexity of the ordinary. Begun in 1986, his psychological and sociological portraits of families revisit the traditional genre of family portraiture.

Home Sweet Home 1970 – 2018: the British home, a political history, coproduced with Rencontres d'Arles and presented in Arles in 2019, brings together thirty artists, across generations, to bring us into everyday life in Great Britain, where interiors are intertwined with politics. Particular attention is paid to the photographic object, including the postcard, with the exhibition Greetings from America: The American postcard 1900 – 1940.

The Institute also presents two new exhibitions on the reappropriation of vernacular photography. Beijing World Park, a new project from artist and collector Thomas Sauvin, is dedicated to tourism and our relationship to monuments. Emmanuelle Fructus’ meticulous photomontages reflect on this popular practice’s codes of social representation.

Paolo Cirio’s Street Ghosts project takes over public spaces with an installation that questions the notions of image rights, public space and privacy laws, using shots from Google Street View.

This first programme, free of charge, is organised as part of the preview, and is an opportunity for audiences to discover the Institute and its programme of activities. A second series of exhibitions is planned for the spring of 2020.

Initiated by the Hauts-de-France Region, in collaboration with Rencontres d'Arles, the Institut pour la photographie is a new place for resources, dissemination, dialogue and experimentation in order to develop photographic culture and support research and creation. Its programme is based on the complementarity and interactivity of five main areas: exhibition, conservation, support for research and creation, education and publishing. At the crossroads of Europe, this new institution is part of a unifying approach of local initiatives and expertise with an international ambition.