Babette Mangolte

From the moment of her arrival in New York, Babette Mangolte set about making a photographic record of art performances and choreography, notably of work being done by artists Richard Whitman, Stuart Sherman and Joan Jonas as well as by experimental choreographers associated with the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village (e.g. Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, Trisha Brown). She continued documenting these avant-garde works well into the mid-1980s, being instrumental in laying down and shaping a significant archive of performance works created in the context of their specific time and place.

As director of photography Babette Mangolte filmed Yvonne Rainer’s Lives of Performers (1972), and Chantal Ackerman’s short La chambre (1972) plus the latter’s full-length feature Jeanne Dielman, 23 rue du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Babette Mangolte made her own first full-length film, What Maisie Knew, in 1974, placing the subjectivity of the camera at the heart of the film’s creative process.

Since the mid-1970s, Babette Mangolte has made over 20 films in this vein, where the camera’s subjective vision, the role of spectators in the filmic process, the relation of the human body to its surrounding space, all contribute to her cinematographic language. Perhaps most representative is the film The Camera:Je, (La Caméra:I) made in 1977.

During the 1980s her attention turned to experience of time in landscapes either through transformations or imagination, for example in There? Where? (1979) or The Sky on Location (1982). Having been a witness to growing urban sprawl across the Californian countryside and the effects of climate change, her work took on a political edge, epitomized by the 1991 film Visible Cities.