“Déjà-vus photographiques” pulls together some 138 works from the bank’s private collection of 1,600 pieces, compiled during the 1980s and 1990s under the initiative of then CEO Raymond Kirsch.
The photos selected provoke a range of reactions, from smiles in the quirky dog’s eye view of Elliott Erwitt to seduction in Newton’s provocative fashion shots and adrenalin in the sports photos of Luxembourg photographer Arthur Thill, who has covered 16 Olympic Games. “Favourites for me are anything in slow motion. The dailies and weeklies don’t print it as much as they would the clean, normal shots,” he told Delano a day before the exhibition inauguration on 8 April. Now the owner of German photo agency ATP, he lamented the difficulties encountered today in accessing such photos. “You’re very restricted as a photographer in the Olympic Games. In the old days there was more flexibility. Now it’s TV, drones, electronic robots that go through the stadium with the camera.”
Images of US towns recur in the exhibition, and this was particularly true for street photographer and German national Petra Arnold who said she fell in love with San Francisco after a first visit in 1996. “I love to watch people. It’s what I do,” she told Delano. “I don’t even know if it’s possible any more to take pictures of people […] because of the rights. In San Francisco they were pretty open.” Bernd Schuler, also from Germany, had some of his portraits and landscapes stretching as far back as the 1970s. His calming view of the Rhine, “Der Rhein”, from 1973, taken during his time at photography school in Munich, contrasts with the playful “Guggenheim” of a woman in a patterned coat studying an equally patterned statue.
The exhibition is hosted in a tunnel constructed 15 metres beneath the “Rousegäertchen” in 1987 to enable staff to move money between the bank’s buildings. It has served as the “Am Tunnel” contemporary art gallery since 1995. The exhibition can be viewed free of charge from 9am to 5:30pm on weekdays, and from 2pm-6pm on Sundays, excluding public holidays. The exhibition is accessible from the BCEE offices at 16 rue Sainte Zithe, 2763 Luxembourg-Gare.
It runs from 9 April to 29 September 2019.