PORTRAIT. Gilles Mora, “exhibition maker” and rocker at heart, will leave the Pavillon populaire in Montpellier on December 31

Gilles Mora, le « monsieur photo » du Pavillon Populaire à Montpellier pendant 14 ans. Ville et Métropole de Montpellier – Cécile MARSON

With his iris always ready to trigger and his rock ear, Gilles Mora, critic, historian, photographer and specialist in 20th century American photography, is leaving the Pavillon Populaire after having been its artistic director since 2010, over the course of 39 remarkable exhibitions.

“When I was offered the chance to work alongside him in 2010, I was 24, I Googled him, I didn't know who Gilles Mora was”, admits Natacha Filiol, production manager since the first exhibition Les suds profonde de l'Amérique.

14 years of exhibitions at the Pavillon Populaire

Gilles Mora will embody himself in an uninterrupted saga of 14 years of photo exhibitions at the Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier, at the rate of two or three annual episodes, no more, the time for the public to absorb them. All audiences! “14 years of pleasure, once we've said that…”, he breathes, with a smile.

Pleasure! A sine qua non for his arrival, fueled by an ambitious and generous program, with great hits of European or world premieres, as was the case for Aaron Siskind, Jakob Tuggenner, Brassaï, Hélène Hoppennot, William Gedney or Elina Brotherus.

Art is anything but constipated

To the one who will succeed him, he advises: “Nothing! Or rather yes! Enjoy yourself, if the pleasure is not there, do nothing. Art is generous, euphoric and joyful, anything but constipated.”

Gilles Mora knows America by heart, by eye, by ear. Not the one of today, “that of the great liberations of the 70s, of the hippies, of the Kennedy clan…”.

When we built ourselves photographically in Louisiana “a bit by chance, in lost villages, to escape military service”, how to recognize “one's” America. “I don't want to go there anymore, it's not the one of intelligence anymore. I loved it with its heaviness and its faults, but not to this point!”

Antebellum south

In 1972, Gilles Mora and his wife Françoise left France to settle in Louisiana and teach French there. He quickly developed a passion for photography and began a project on the Deep South of the United States, whose traditional culture, that of the Antebellum South, and its rejection of modernity fascinated him. “I have explored it to the bone, I have planted all my fantasies there: sensual, musical, literary, photographic.” The result is a collection of 135 black and white images, rarely shown by Lamaindonne.

A total freedom

The heart in America, the body in the Bordeaux region, when Michaël Delafosse offered him the job of directing the Pavillon in 2010, he assured him of total freedom,“Leave me alone. I was already 65, I was leaving the Arles festival. I was able to do what I wanted under Mandroux, Saurel or Delafosse, a luxury”, he admits. And a leitmotif, “all the exhibitions would be exclusives”.

“We never bought an exhibition kit that had worked well somewhere. With Gilles, it's new, all the time. It allowed me to learn a lot. He is a spiritual father to me”, confides Natacha Filiol who implements each exhibition catalogue. The word that comes to him to sum up these Mora years: “gratitude”.

“On the retrospective of the major figure of American photography Aaron Siskind, the New York Times asked: but why in Montpellier?”, he laughs.

In 2023, he welcomes the millionth visitor

In the exhibitions he would direct, people would go there without spending a penny. An insufficient motive to create social bonds, but at least the free admission motivates first-time visitors, less familiar with these places. And to renew the public, to diversify it… in short, to dust it off. “I have always had the need to be a facilitator, to try to explain clearly to the public what seems important to me, without sinking into sterile intellectualism”.

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A year after welcoming the millionth visitor, Gilles Mora bows out on December 31 while the exhibition dedicated to the portraits of Gisèle Freund Une écriture du regard runs until February 9, 2025. “I could have stayed until I was 80 (he's 79, editor's note), I'm leaving before they say “the old man is annoying!”.

“I have always chased after time, seizing every opportunity to erase it, to make us forget the abyss it is hurling us into”

A cycle ends. Once the essential is done, there is no point in repeating ourselves.” It is up to the municipality to find a successor. “I have always chased after time, seizing every opportunity to erase it, to make us forget the abyss it is hurling us into”, he admits on the back cover of his only photographic collection Antebellum. “There have been 39 hard-hitting exhibitions! All remarkable” explains Natacha Filiol. “He is an extraordinary exhibition maker”.

55,000 visitors for Linda McCartney

With an average attendance of 12,000 visitors per year, before Mora, the exhibitions began to deliver their contingent oscillating between 25,000 and 30,000 spectators, with a peak of 55,000 for Linda McCartney. “I had known Linda a little. Paul came at his own expense, by private jet”.

 

Sir Paul McCartney

Hosted by Hélène Mandroux, Sir Paul Mc Cartney was present at the opening of Linda in 2014. The work of hanging and scenography, the polished lighting on the originals of Linda Mc Cartney, the keyboard player of Wings who died in 1998, make the visit an immersion in the sweet intimacy of the McCartneys and in paradise the immortals that are Hendrix, Joplin, Morrisson. “I was the friend of Carl Perkins, the idol of my 15 years. Paul being an absolute fan, he agreed to exhibit Linda in Montpellier. A pure chance!”

Media coverage and popular success are causing the counters at the turnstile to explode!

The Strange Mr Summers

In February 2019, the Pavillon populaire once again created an event in Montpellier, by offering visitors the chance to discover the photographic world of Andy Summers, the famous guitarist of the legendary band The Police. The exhibition Une certain étrangeté – photographies 1979-2018 attracted a record number of visitors. With 37,422 visitors in ten weeks of exhibition, this is the best attendance at the Pavillon Populaire for a winter presentation.

This is how the program is written, based on ambitious themes, more rarely controversial.“They are always artists he knows, ready to get started with him. We met the artist or his beneficiaries, we searched the archives, like for William Gedney in Mississippi! We worked miracles with ultra-tight budgets.”

The hanging A Dictator in Images that reveals photos by Heinrich Hoffmann, a German photographer under the Third Reich creates emotion. It is a first in Europe, with only Adolf Hitler as the character. Gilles Mora wants it “historical and educational”.

A well-argued and renewed scenography

An exhibition that Natacha Filiol will remember for a long time. The bet is risky, “but Gilles was in image education, through mediators, historical and scientific guarantors, a committee. I had to explore these shots for hours, but it was no less difficult for I am a man”, an exhibition on the evolution of civil rights in the southern United States between 1960 and 1970.

The wall-mounted display always has its own logic, argued, accompanied by texts, and a scenography that is renewed each time. Becoming Peter Lindbergh presented in 2022, welcomes 57,000 visitors, at a frenetic pace of 715 per day.

Rhythm is the basis of all triggering for Gilles Mora. That of his own camera first. “I take photos all the time, always on film”, in music “with the Frantic Rollers”, the oldest French rock group, they say, of which he is the guitarist and singer, in literature,“it's my first training”: “pleasure and work are acquired through knowledge, if you start, you have to be up to it”.

Gina, Sophia…

He would have liked to freeze the faces through time of Sophia Loren or Lola Lollobrigida, both photographers. “It would have been called Regarder passer les femmes”, emphasizes Natacha Filiol, who cannot accept the idea that Gilles Mora's work will one day not be at the heart of an exhibition. “For me it's obvious. But for the moment he is against it”.

Gilles Mora is not at the end of his projects. “I would have liked to launch a retrospective on the German photo, Paul Wolff. Who knows. Nothing is finished yet”.

“He has had a hundred lives”, exclaims Natacha Filiol. Like film photography, memories never fade. The one where they devour kaiserschmarr, a plum crepe in a Viennese café. Where she lets herself be carried away in “her stories over a beer”. A hundred lives we tell you!

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