To pursue our archives selection, Polka is pleased to present our recent exhibition, « Sur la route de l’Orient », uniting both MARC RIBOUD and STEVE MCCURRY.

It’s the story of two masters of photography meeting, a Frenchman Marc Riboud and an American Steve McCurry. Both share the experience of having traveled the route to the Orient. Several times and especially, at different times. One in the 1950s, the other in the 1980s. Their works, one in black and white, the other in color, are compared for the first time. At the age of 32, in 1955, Marc Riboud began a long journey from Beirut to Beijing. In a Land Rover, he makes the trip by road. At a time when it was still possible. Türkiye, Iran, Caspian Sea, then Afghanistan. The street, the path, the track... The photos express a profound poetry. Life and its little shadow theater are exposed without filter. On the course, his view asserts itself through his “classics”, such as the famous shot of the “dhoti” on the banks of the Ganges. Later, this poetic Orient fades away. Conflicts – in Vietnam, but also with the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran – are disenchanting the visionn of this land of dreams. Steve McCurry also made the big trip to the East. At the age of 28, in 1978, he discovered India. Hi shed full of pictures. Those of a book – The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) by Paul Théroux, but also those of photographers who preceded him, like Cartier-Bresson and… Marc Riboud! The trip to India has an initiatory dimension. The mystical splendor of the monasteries of Ladakh transforms it. Steve McCurry's Orient, however, is no longer this enchanted horizon of the 1950s. We travel faster, more easily. The war is ravaging Afghanistan – he will return there thirty times! – and globalization is leveling out differences. The orientalizing dream has passed, even if McCurry, a virtuoso of color, plays with it. As if to preserve the memory. Marc Riboud and Steve McCurry brought back a good no less precious than the spices sought by their distant Renaissance ancestors: the image, the gold of the Orient. And they offered it to the world. By mixing vintage black and white prints and Fujiflex color prints, the Polka gallery is happy to take the road alongside these two great photographers.