At Les Douches la Galerie, Jeux de mots, curated by Éric Rémy, brings together a rich selection of artists including Berenice Abbott, Tom Arndt, Pierre Boucher, Sophie Calle, Roger Catherineau, Stéphane Couturier, Joël Ducorroy, Henri Foucault, Jean-Claude Gautrand, Nicole Gravier, Hervé Guibert, Ernst Haas, Anneliese Hager, Raymond Hains, Frank Horvat, Bogdan Konopka, François Kollar, Barbara Kruger, Yvan Le Bozec, Vivian Maier, Ray K. Metzker, Duane Michals, Jean Moral, Marvin E. Newman, Roger Parry, Denis Roche, Man Ray, Joost Schmidt, Maurice Tabard, Patrick Tosani, Moï Ver, Sabine Weiss and Klaus Wittkugel, offering a wide-ranging reflection on the relationship between language and photography.
Following Dans ma cuisine, the gallery’s previous exhibition devoted to domestic interiors and everyday objects, this project shifts the focus toward language itself—words, letters, and typographic signs—as they enter the photographic image not as captions, but as active visual and conceptual elements. Rather than simply accompanying the image, text here disrupts, reframes, and expands it, opening new layers of meaning and interpretation. The exhibition thus continues a broader investigation into photography’s capacity to interrogate familiar signs and transform the ordinary into a critical and sensory experience.
Historically, text and photography long existed in a hierarchical relationship, with images illustrating and words explaining. This balance began to shift in the 1920s, when avant-garde movements such as the Bauhaus, driven by figures like László Moholy-Nagy, as well as Constructivism with El Lissitzky and the Dada movement, introduced new forms of integration between typography and image. In France, the magazine VU played a key role in elevating photography to a central position within visual culture, marking the moment when images began to rival text in authority.
Throughout the 20th century, artists developed increasingly complex dialogues between these two forms. From Bauhaus experiments—where figures like Joost Schmidt integrated letters into visual compositions—to the work of artists such as Moï Ver, trained under Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, the interplay between text and image became a site of formal innovation. In Paris, initiatives like Arts & Métiers Graphiques, founded by Charles Peignot, fostered a new visual language in which photomontage, collage, and typography merged seamlessly.
Beyond printed media, this interaction extended into urban space, where signage, posters, and advertising saturated the visual landscape, becoming key subjects for photographers such as Berenice Abbott and Ernst Haas. At the same time, more experimental practices emerged: Raymond Hains fragmented language through distorted imagery, while later artists like Sophie Calle and Duane Michals constructed narrative works in which text and image function as parallel structures.
The exhibition also highlights the political dimension of language in photography. From the graffiti documented during May 1968 by Jean-Claude Gautrand to the bold typographic interventions of Barbara Kruger, text becomes a tool of critique and public expression.
Ultimately, Jeux de mots reveals how photography has progressively absorbed language, transforming it into both subject and material. In today’s context—shaped by the rise of AI-generated images based on textual prompts—the exhibition suggests a striking reversal: language once again takes precedence, shaping the image and closing a historical loop in which text and photography continuously redefine one another.

JEUX DE MOTS
until MAY 13, 2026
Les Douches la Galerie, Paris – France

More info:
https://www.lesdoucheslagalerie.com/