French National Library, exhibition at Espace Colbert, 1989
Accompanying text by J-C. Lemagny, curator at the Prints and Photography Department, now retired: ‘… There is only mud and humans. Of course, we think of the great Greek myth of the birth of Venus, who emerges from the foam and stands up in the light, like a living marble statue. But this myth is not enough because we are in a Nordic world, without sun or marble, a world of wind, swell and grey skies, where beings are born out of a less triumphant fertility, but profound and slow in a different way.’

Art Press No. 13 off-print Oct. 92
J.-C. Lemagny ‘When I saw those women emerging from the silt, in Ben Hansen’s photos in 1980, I felt that at last, a work was rising without the aid of conceptual appendages or intellectual crutches.