In all its eroticism, violence and magic, Mexico has inspired some great photography over the past 100 years. Yet the contemporary photographer, Alejandra Figueroa, who grew up in the Sixties and Seventies in the thick of its tumultuous and exotic culture, decided to run away and seek inspiration in Europe. Eschewing the hectic colour and noise of her homeland, she travelled to Paris, where she was drawn to the cool, quiet rooms of the city’s museums. Here in the Palais du Louvre and the Mus?e d’Orsay she began to study classical statuary through her lens, recording the smooth limbs and fleshy folds of medieval and Renaissance sculpture. Her eye and her camera transformed these ancient works and brought them to life.
This autumn she travelled to London and spent a week at the V&A Museum, training her camera on the magnificent sculptures – the Giambologna Samson, Leda and the Swan, Venus, Apollo and others – that will form the climactic core of the museum’s new medieval and Renaissance galleries, due to open next month.
Described in words, her work seems straightforward enough: black and white representational photographs of some of the most beautiful sculptures in the museum’s collection. Exquisitely composed, they are presented with a grainy texture and a deeply appetising patina of rich, luminous browns and milky greys. In some she finds an almost abstract quality in the fragments on which she focuses; in others, she squeezes sensuality out of stone.
Looking at these photographs, it is as if your eyes have been rinsed and you are seeing the artworks afresh. Suddenly, ancient torsos pack an erotic, modern punch – more Beckham six-pack than ancient monument.
Figueroa works as unfussily as almost any photographer I have met. She shoots in natural light, without tripod or ladder or other extraneous gear, and occasionally pulls the black shawl from her neck and asks her assistant to hold it up, in the most ad hoc fashion, as a backdrop. She prowls around the sculpture for a couple of minutes, fires off eight or ten frames, and then that’s it. Job done, and on to the next one.
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“I’ve always loved museums,” she says. “I love the cool, quiet feel of these places and the absolute beauty of these magnificent works of art. I’m always amazed at the way people just glance at them, read the captions and then walk on. I think we have lost the art of looking properly at sculpture. Personally, I can’t keep my eyes off them. I find them captivating.”
On the train on the day Figueroa arrived in Paris, she happened to meet a woman who introduced her to Jean-Yves Breguand, the legendary printer who has worked with Sebastião Salgado, Sarah Moon, Raymond Depardon and many others. From him she learnt her printing techniques.
The subject matter took a hold of her quickly, too. “I started wandering around the amazing museums of Paris and I became completely crazy and obsessed. The colours, the aesthetics, the compositions and harmony began to drive me mad. I found all this in the museums. I felt calm and at peace among these beautiful things, and madly obsessed when I was not among them. I wanted to steal the sculptures, but instead I took them away in my camera? I couldn’t get enough of them. I would come in and photograph like a mad woman. They feel so alive, so sensual to me.”
Nothing takes the light more gratefully than a surface of weathered marble or stone. Figueroa’s photographs are startlingly beautiful. Apollo, for example, carved in marble in 1577 by Pietro Francavilla, is revealed as an almost feminine figure with the curve of the back, the jut of the hips, the creamy acreage of arm and pillowy buttocks. Her portrait of Jason, carved in marble by an unknown sculptor between 1550 and 1600, is cropped to draw attention to the beautiful line of his curved waist.
The V&A’s new galleries have been seven and a half years in the planning and will cover the period 300 to 1600, bringing together the museum’s medieval and Renaissance works from around Europe. The final gallery will be filled with these sculptures, which once stood in the halls and gardens of spectacular Renaissance buildings. Figueroa’s photographs give us a fresh view of these artworks: a view that is honestly sensuous and openly romantic.
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The V&A’s new medieval and Renaissance galleries open on December 2. For further details, go to www.vam.ac.uk