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© M. Karplus
François-Mitterrand
14 May I 25 August 2013
© M. Karplus
PRESS RELEASE
© M. Karplus
Color of the Fifties
Photographs by Martin Karplus
Martin Karplus is a famous American chemist. He travelled extensively throughout the
world in the Fifties and Sixties with his Leica and made thousands of color photographs
on early Kodachrome slide film. A hundred or so of these photographs that were scanned
are exhibited at the BnF. They show the inquiring mind and profoundly humanist vision
of their author.
Martin Karplus was a pioneer in the application of nuclear magnetic resonance to chemistry
and developed what is now known as the ‘Karplus Equation’. He is also famous for the
introduction of molecular dynamics simulations of proteins, a technique now used worldwide in fundamental research and drug design. Professor Emeritus at Harvard, he has been
associated with Jean-Marie Lehn and Jean-Pierre Changeux at the Collège de France and runs
a laboratory at the Université de Strasbourg. But he was still a student when he made some
of theses photographs in the early Fifties.
Born in Vienna (Austria) in 1930, he immigrated with his family to the United States in 1938. In
1953, at the age of 23, he had a Harvard B.A.degree and had complete his Ph.D. at ‘CalTech’
(California Institute of Technology). The same year, his parents gave him the Leica IIIC camera
that his uncle Alex had brought from Vienna for him.
He received a post-doctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation to go to Oxford
University to continue his studies at the Mathematical Institute in the fall of 1953. Between
university terms, the young scientist left his research work and used the time to explore
Europe. He visited France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Germany, Yugoslavia…
He recorded his vision of the people he saw and places he visited with his Leica. He used
the new superb 35 mm Kodachrome film that allowed amateur photographers to make vidid
color photographs. In the late Fifties, he begins his career as a university professor in the
United States and in the early Sixties, he visited Latin America, China and Japan when invited
to lecture, always having his Leica with him
Martin Karplus made over 4000 color slides over a twelve year period. He often used a long
focal length lens (called Hector) to photograph street scenes. With such a lens and its viewer,
the photographer can face away from his subject when taking a picture, which makes it
possible for him to obtain natural portraits. Only recently Martin Karplus learned that Paul
Strand and Walker Evans, the American pioneers of Street Photography, used a similar trick in
the Twenties.
All the slides remained in their boxes during forty years while the scientist devoted himself
to his research. During the year 2000, he was again in Oxford and met Paul Sims, a master
craftsman, who scanned a selection of the slides, revealing images that preserved the original
vivid colors. The photographs show the inquiring mind of a young scientist deeply involved in
recording the scenes of everyday life and the people he met during his travels. Martin Karplus
was undoubtedly influenced by humanist photography; but he also demonstrated an intuitive
grasp of the language of color that structures and enlivens his photographs.
The photographs on display are prints made from the scans of the original slides. They were
made by the Laboratoire Picto.
Exhibition
Color of the Fifties. Photographs by Martin Karplus
14 May I 25 August 2013
BnF I François-Mitterrand
Allée Julien Cain
Quai François-Mauriac, Paris XIIIe
Tuesdays to Saturdays 9 a.m.- 8 p.m.
Sundays 1 p.m.-7 p.m.
Mondays 1 p.m.- 8 p.m.
Closed on bank holidays
Free admission
Curator
Sylvie Aubenas, Chief of Prints and Photographs Department, BnF
Publication
Martin Karplus, La Couleur des années 1950
24x20cm, 104 pages, 85 photographs
with texts by Sylvie Aubenas, Jean-Pierre Changeux et Nathalie Boulouch
Editions de l’Œil
Press contacts
Claudine Hermabessière, Head of the press department and media partnerships
01 53 79 41 18 - [email protected]
Isabelle Coilly, Press officer, 01 53 79 40 11 - [email protected]
Pictures :
1
2
3
1/ Grand Canyon, Arizona, 1956 © M. Karplus, BnF, dep. Estampes et photographie
2/ Copenhague, 1955 © M. Karplus, BnF, dep. Estampes et photographie
3/ Tokyo, 1962© M. Karplus, BnF, dep. Estampes et photographie