French actress Eva Green captivated onlookers in Paris recently, when she attended the opening of her aunt’s photo exhibition in Paris where she wore jewellery from Montblanc.
The former Bond-girl was seen at the exhibition, called Green, wearing three rings from Montblanc’s 4810 Classic collection, each in either red, white or yellow gold and set with diamonds and a pair of earrings from the Star collection, made in silver and onyx.
The subject of the exhibition, which was held at the Galerie Catherine Houard, was the actress’s aunt, Marika Green, who has put together a series of 100 photographs tracing the history of four generations of the family. The exhibition runs until December 25 in Paris and then will travel the world with stops in Vienna and Zurich.
This is an invitation to take a trip back in time. A journey back through time and history to a century ago, and also to take the time to tell a story, the story of a family. One family, four generations, which have, each in a different way, something to do with one same objective, one enigma: the photographic lens. For this is, of course, also an invitation to take a voyage through the images, through these photos, taken between the years of 1894 and 2010.
I wanted you to discover and get to know Mia Green, my Swedish grandmother. In Sweden, she is now finally recognized as a photographer, but only because she documented a certain historical group of events, the events that took place during World War I in the town in which she lived, Haparanda. And yet, she was much more than just a witness to these events. She was, during the last years of the nineteenth century, a pioneer in the world of photography. At the age of twenty, she would get on her bicycle, wander through Haparanda and the surrounding villages at the northernmost point of Sweden, and take thousands of pictures, recorded on glass plates, putting together her own point of view of what she saw every day.
Lennart Green, my father, in turn also became a photographer. He worked in Sweden and Germany at first, but it was in post-war Paris, the Paris of Saint Germain des Près and the New Wave, that he constructed a significant body of work by photographing the greatest celebrities of the time in the worlds of literature, cinema and music.
Rediscovering all these images, I came to the conclusion that this photographic history had a definite sense, a coherence that was very relevant. To this day, photography remains very much present, even very powerfully so, in the Green family. Now, having worked myself for years as an actress and model for the greatest photographers, my niece, Eva Green shines radiantly for the camera lens of many renowned photographers and filmmakers.
Hence, this exhibit in the shape of a voyage through time and space, form and style, a voyage that questions the confines of what defines a body of work, of art, and what remains simply a historical document. It is a constantly moving and stimulating process, since “The question is not whether photography is art, but rather when it becomes art.“ (Jean-François Chevrier)
GREEN PHOTOGRAPHIC SIGHTS IMAGES 1894–2010
Actress and model Marika Green has put together a collection of approximately one hundred photos retracing the personal journey of four generations of the same family, all involving photography.
These perspectives and these subjects invite us to make a subjective excursion into the political, social and esthetic history of an entire century, and even a bit beyond: from the history of Sweden at the beginning of the twentieth century, through two world wars, everyday life and cultural life in Paris in the fifties and sixties, and finally the fashion world and that of the cinema, from the sixties all the way to the present day.
Four generations represented here by two photographers, Mia Green (1870–1949) and Lennart Green (1913–2007), and two women who are each both actress and model, Marika Green and Eva Green, photographed by some of the great photographers of the last fifty years, Helmut Newton, Jeanloup Sieff, William Klein, Guy Bourdin, Peter Knapp, Frank Horvat, Willy Rizzo, Ellen von Unwerth, Lothar Schmid and Paolo Roversi.
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