The advent of digital image making and of platforms for the incessant circulation of digital images fundamentally transformed our engagement with visual material. These developments have also had a pronounced influence in artistic production across media. Photography, being the obvious example, has been highly reactive to these changes, however, as curator and critic Benoît Lamy de La Chapelle writes here, you wouldn’t necessarily know it by engaging with Christopher Williams’s practice. Reflecting on Williams’s recent solo show in Paris – his first in the city since 1999 – Lamy de La Chapelle argues that while Williams’s work has long played with manipulation and self-reflexivity, it leaves us helpless to confronting unprecedented questions.
Presenting Christopher Williams’s first solo show in Paris since 1999, “standard pose” was imagined as a sort of retrospective displaying an elegant selection of photographs dated from 2008 to 2021. Such a configuration, though not exhaustive, allowed for a reflection on his work’s development over this period. Looking back at this work prompts a consideration of the significance of his approach in 2022, a moment saturated with the circulation of digital images on various platforms, and how this lens might give new perspectives and readings of his art.