5EXHIBITION
This section of the site is dedicated to our dear friend Charles Thomas, who was fatally stabbed on the streets of Paris in 1999.
Charles delighted in blending our photographs without a care for crediting our names, nor any attachment to intellectual property or even the instinct of ownership. This spirit perfectly matched the rebellious and defiant nature of the five members of the collective in the 90’s. Charles even created photographic objects— a fusion of steel, wood, images, and fabric— that one day, we shall have to present…
He was, along with Ethan Lichtenfeld and to a lesser extent Hikaru Ushizima, the originator of the “code of conduct” for the Chambre 5 collective
It was a set of constraints reminiscent of the literary games of the Collège de Pataphysique or, more recently, of Oulipo.
This series of rules prohibited us from nearly everything: not showing our images, not showing ourselves, not anticipating any income from photography, renouncing prestigious publications. The only allowance was to give our images away to illustrate literary or poetry websites, and our old website became a self-service hub.
Les expositions chambre5 sont des gestes furtifs, des apparitions silencieuses où la photographie se tient en retrait, sans légende ni explication.
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The chambre5 exhibitions are furtive gestures — silent appearances where photography remains in the background, without caption or explanation.