The Kiss
April 7 – June 26, 2016

Let’s recollect some of the most memorable lip-locks of all time.

Is it the kiss from a handsome prince that would bring Sleeping Beauty back to life? Or the kiss of Judas? Or a so called “Eskimo kiss” with a tip of the nose? Perhaps, a fraternal embrace of comrade Brezhnev? Or all covered with gold The kiss by Gustav Klimt? Perhaps, you may recall a movie kiss? Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh’s in Gone With the Wind or the passionate and tragic embrace outside the trenches in Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying? What melodies come to your mind? “Besa me mucho” by Consuelo Velasquez or “Every step you take…” by The Police? A kiss is the most natural way of expressing sentiments of love and tenderness.
Similar to music, literature, and cinema, photography has its own impressive, famous, and extraordinary kisses.

The Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography presents an exhibition entitled The Kiss, which encompasses around fifty works by Russian, American and European artists sourced from museums and private collections from all over the world.

The Kiss explores love in all their manifestations, including a fervent Californian kiss overseen by the great Elliott Erwitt in a rear-view mirror, a nurse giving a welcome kiss to a French prisoner of war, who has just returned from Germany, witnessed by Willy Ronis at the Gare d’Orsay in Paris, and, of course, the archetypal mother and son kiss by Harold Feinstein. One may also recall Gina Lollobrigida spectacularly kissing Yuri Gagarin captured by Yakov Khalip at Moscow International Film Festival in 1961. There are so many kisses in the world…