INDOC. Documentation Centre about Art and Nature

CDAN opens Heresies, a retrospective of the work of Pedro Meyer

An exhibition entitled Heresies, featuring the work of artist Pedro Meyer, opens at the CDAN on 3 October. The retrospective covers five decades of the output of one of the world's most innovative artists.

The exhibition, which is opening simultaneously at 100 museums worldwide, breaks new ground in terms of the approach taken to exhibiting photography. Heresies is being staged in collaboration with the Periferias Festival and runs until 9 November.

The use of new exhibition methods raises two questions about the approaches museums take: what is a photography exhibition now? What will they be like in the future?

Pedro Meyer’s project involves putting all of his images online and using electronic tools to show them. The exhibition defies the boundaries that define our existing notion of what a photography exhibition is by presenting large-format prints alongside new technological elements such as digital multimedia galleries that combine text, images and audio, and by using iPhones and iPods to download videos and audio. The approach facilitates interaction between participating museums and between museums and visitors.

Heresies invites us to reflect on the use of technology as a tool for research and for disseminating photography archives, while also taking an in-depth look at photography, from its constant technological development to its social impact. Over 300,000 images from both analogue and digital sources and nearly 2,500 documents have been put online and interrelated.

Meyer famously said that all photographs – whether digitally manipulated or not – are equally ‘true’ and ‘untrue’. As a result he has been labelled a ‘heretic’ by the orthodox documentary photography community. His personal contributions to the field of digital photography include creating the first CD-ROM to combine sound and images, producing the first digital prints ever made and, in 1994, creating the online photography forum, zonezero.com – the most-visited digital photography content site on the web.

More information

• Pedro Meyer's official website

• Webpage for the exhibition (CDAN website)

• Zonezero photography forum

• Website for the Periferias Festival

• Catalogue for the Pedro Meyer exhibition

Source: texts – CDAN; photograph, Los últimos rayos del sol (1989), by Pedro Meyer.

6 Printable version             Q Back to newsletter contents