Jessica Lange
Still Image
NOW
Musei Reali, Torino - Italy
October 7, 2026 - February 7, 2027
For more than thirty years, alongside the film career that has made her known throughout the world, Jessica Lange has been quietly building a photographic body of work of remarkable discretion. It's a work born away from the public gaze, with neither ambition nor intention of being shown, accumulating slowly, in shadow and silence. Throughout all these years, photography has remained an intimate space for her, a silent, almost secret practice, in which each image came to join those that proceded it, like the pages of a journal for which she alone was the intended reader.
For Jessica Lange, then, to photograph is above all a way of
inhabiting the world, perhaps because images, as Georges Didi-
Huberman has written, are as much bearers of desires as they are
of memories. Her wanderings – through the United States,
Mexico, Italy, Russia, and elsewhere –never arise from a
documentary impulse to capture, collect, or pin something down
for display. They stem instead from a state of openness to reality
and to the present moment. She gives herself over to it without
condition or concession. To walk, and in doing so, to inhabit the
time of walking. To look, then stop. To wait. To wait a little longer,
until the almost imperceptible stirring of reality occurs before her
eyes. To anticipate it by a fraction of a second, guided perhaps by
an exceptionally acute intuition. The image carries within it the
long duration of walking and contemplation, and beyond that,
both the slow sedimentation and the sudden crystallization of the
real. This inward disposition – this willingness to “let things come
to oneself” – recalls the concept of the dérive as formulated by
Guy Debord in 1956: “The dérive is a technique of rapid passage
through varied ambiances.”
