Harrison Ford, Los Angeles, 1968
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March 1, 2024
Desire to See: Photographs by Agnès Varda
“Agnès Varda,” wrote Richard Brody in The New Yorker, upon her death at 90, in 2019, “is one of the filmmakers who brought about the revolution in personal cinema.” A director and screenwriter of the French New Wave as well as a photographer and visual artist, Varda infused her work, Brody continues, with “personal experience, political insight and activism, an ardent vision for landscape, and intense curiosity about the lives of others.” Born in Belgium, in 1928, Varda studied art history and photography before directing her first feature film, La Pointe Courte, at the age of 26. This exhibition, the first on Varda in the U.S., displays her photographs, some of which she took while living in Los Angeles with her husband, the filmmaker Jacques Demy. Portraits of the Black Panthers, Fidel Castro, and others are presented alongside self-portraits, and highlight Varda’s fusion of the personal and the political. —Jeanne Malle