Benjamin Katz: Fleurs Exhibition Catalogue Knust Kunz Gallery Edition

Don’t forget your flowers, Mr Katz! In the life of a bouquet of flowers there is occasionally a photographer. And in the life of a photographer there are sometimes flowers. That’s what happened to Benjamin Katz, and perhaps it was meant to happen to him. All his life he has been making portraits of artists. Thousands of portraits, not of thousands of artists, but of a few dozen nonetheless. No need to ­recall all their names. Certainly more than you might think. He discovered them before anyone else. After all these years of being there, after all these works he has shown, that he sometimes was even the first to see, to have, and to show, he comes out of his house, let’s say in the morning, on the day he usually buys a bunch of flowers at the market. This bouquet of the day, ­easily obtained, he takes it upstairs to his home, puts it in a vase, puts it in his world in always the same place, on the cooker, and takes a picture of it. The ever same photo with the same lens and, as he repeats this operation, he ends up, fair weather or foul, with a sequence of days with flowers, like those calendars from the post office.

Éric Darragon, born in 1944, is a French art historian who taught at the University Paris 1 Sorbonne until his retirement. He was director of the Research Centre for Cultural and Social History of Art (EA4100) and the Inter-University Research Centre for Contemporary Art (CIRHAC). He was also a member of the editorial board of the magazines Critique d'art and Perspective.