Most of the Memphis I carry around in my head, I have never actually touched. I know the Carlton bookcase the way I know most famous objects, through photographs (Karl Lagerfeld’s apartment, David Bowie’s rooms, a thousand mood boards since). The plastic laminate, the clashing geometry, the patterns Nathalie Du Pasquier built to be read flat. These were objects, but they were also graphics, and the picture is how most of the world met them.
So a photography project about Memphis isn’t a novelty, is a homecoming of sorts.
As Seen By puts four pieces in front of three photographers and then gets out of the way. Memphis calls it not “an archival revisitation but a new interpretation,” the kind of line every brand writes rarely earns. This one mostly does, because the objects were built for exactly this.
Mattia Balsamini
Mattia Balsamini takes Michele De Lucchi’s Riviera chair and strips it of everything. There is no set, no scene, just the chair alone in space.
Alecio Ferrari
Alecio Ferrari, working with set designer Danila Saulino, goes the other way and lets the objects misbehave. The Ettore Sottsass Tahiti lamp becomes a creature with a pale pink face, canary neck, and red beak, like a weird bird that was hiding in the original all along.
Louis De Belle
Louis De Belle keeps it domestic. He shoots Hyatt, the side table Ettore designed in 1984 for his own Milan home, as a piece of ordinary life, moving through rooms and moods without losing its edge.
Ettore Sottsass was a photographer before he was a brand. He shot Hemingway, Ginsberg, Dylan, Mapplethorpe. The Triennale built a whole show this past winter out of 1,200 of his own pictures. The group’s name, the story goes, came from a Bob Dylan song playing in his apartment the night it started. Memphis and the camera were never separate things.
