Mois de la photo.

Some of the first sights photography presented to the world were the rooftops and streets of Paris, wondrously captured in the early works of both its French and English inventors, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot. However, in contrast to the early English tendency to sequestrate photographic practice within an elite circle of amateurs, France and the French government were in the vanguard of exploiting photography's commercial possibilities. Modernity and photography were inseparably allied in Paris, as the state sponsored missions to document the past and present of the city-in-transition and portrait studios took up residence on Baron Haussmann's fashionable new boulevards. Nineteenth-century photography in Paris offered a sneak preview of an increasingly commodified "reality of appearances" by casting a democratizing sheen over the urban repertory of celebrities, criminals, outcasts and the man in the street alike. At the same time, photography also enveloped the city in an aura of decay, arresting and bottling time and instantaneously framing Paris as a realm of ghosts, haunts and lost stories, now so permanently infected by a retrospectively Benjaminian sensibility that almost any old photograph of Paris seems to suggest "the scene of a crime."

In the twentieth century, photography was central to such Parisian-born aesthetic movements as Surrealism, facilitating its distortions and deconstructions of the body even as it traced the poetic trajectories and chance encounters of its urban flaneurs. Through the development and high profile presence in Paris of crack picture agencies such as Magnum, the city has also been at ground zero in the development of modern documentary practices. Thanks in no small part to the vigorous efforts of Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Andre Kertesz and others, by mid-century Paris not only had played a significant role in the founding of a photographic avant-garde, it often appeared as the very image - fragmentary, poignant, violent, futile - of the modern experience itself. It is a small wonder that Paris has often tried to style itself as the "capital of photography."(1) At the end of the millennium however, with the postmodern splintering of aesthetic focus into countless regional centers, Paris must assert its claim to a photographic significance in other ways, not only by managing its patrimonial stake in the medium's past, but by charting a new contemporaneity. The question of what forms these claims might take is not without a broader significance.

It was certainly with such claims in mind that the "Mois de la Photo," a month-long showcase of the photographic arts, made its tenth biennial appearance in November 1998 under the artistic direction of Jean-Luc Monterosso. Created in 1980, at the same moment when critical and commercial interest in photography began to increase exponentially, the "Mois de la Photo" not only seeks to provide a collective framework for individual exhibitions of historical and contemporary interest, but it also organizes them into a conceptual whole. This year's exhibition proposed three overarching themes: l'enfermement and the complex of associations engaged by both photography's affinity for the technologies of imprisonment and its formal character as a frame or enclosure; l'intimite and the embeddedness of photography in everyday life, its ability to convey both proximity and detail; and I'evenement, an acknowledgment of photography's continuing role in documenting the events of modern life, placing us once again at the tangled intersection between photography's artistic aspirations, its commercial exploitation as a technology of mass media and its importance in forging the images that become our collective memories. In 1998, 79 exhibits were given the honor of official affiliation with the "Mois de la Photo," with countless others riding on the event's coattails. Such a critical mass of past and recent, newly challenging and marvelously familiar work is not only exciting, but also exhausting and occasionally dispiriting. This may be precisely the point, for like it or not, such extended showcases as the "Mois de la Photo" compel consideration of photography's limits and capacities; it requires that we question whether there is anything left for photography to do.

Fortunately, a number of persuasive answers were advanced, among them a series of photograms by Roselyne Pelaquier exhibited at the Galerie Jean-Pierre Lambert. Entitled "Le Corps pensif" ("The Thinking Body"), each small image appeared as an almost calligraphic, barely figurative (but not quite) form, a mark etched on contrasting ground. These marks (or forms) neither describe nor reproduce the body, even as they are literally produced by the play of light over the human skulls that Pelaquier arranged on photosensitive paper. Few of these marks are literally recognizable as skulls, but each manages to sustain the connection to the body nonetheless - with a jagged play of cracks and fissures suggestive of the body's folds and crevices, or dance-like ciphers that seem to approximate bodily gesture and movement, all the while remaining intransigently motionless. In these images Pelaquier has pared the photogram's formal possibilities down to the bare minimum, working within a pictorial economy that banishes transparency, substituting instead the bony, picked-clean contrast between a starkly limned but unnamable "something" (either the black or white) and incipient nothingness (also either the black or white).

Pelaquier's interest in modes of bodily inscription, in cultural taboos regulating the representation of the body and in archetypal forms might suggest a relationship to the work of her better-known French colleague Annette Messager. But Pelaquier's images seem not so much intent on finding fetishistic body surrogates as on inscribing the body's absence through processes and metaphors that still remain insistently material, tactile and indexically bound to the body. The results appear as much invested in the cerebral character of abstraction and the formal characteristics of photography as the hard physical facts of the body - as if for Pelaquier there was no need to choose. This seems to be the general context for Pelaquier's observation that, "The photogram approaches the question of the relationship to the real differently: it begins with touch and contact. It privileges proximity rather than space, surface rather than focus; skin rather than eyes. It has faith in the thickness of shadow."(2) It also seems to be the reason for her choice of the skull as a shape/object at once structural, present, concrete and yet empty, stripped and vacated of the significance that once rendered it a vessel of the "self."

Pelaquier's work found a powerful counterpoint in Patrick Bailly-Maitre-Grand's series of photographs entitled "Les Gemelles" ("Twins"), exhibited at the Galerie Baudoin Lebon. These large format, richly printed images of old, heavy-framed mirrors, their silvered surfaces chipped, corroded, clouded and darkened, were each accompanied by a negative print. The series was complemented by another entitled "Les Uranies," a sequence of seven views of a moonlit garden, seen through a steamed-up window on whose foggy surface the artist had scribbled various numbers and characters with his finger, also accompanied by a negative image. In his remarks accompanying the exhibition, Bailly-Maitre-Grand quotes Garry Winogrand, who once declared that "I photograph in order to see what things look like once photographed."(3) The closed-circuit logic of this statement is perfectly exemplified by the interplay between the mirror as object and the mirror as image initiated in "Les Gemelles" that seems to set up an ontological investigation of the medium (is photography a "reflection" of the world?) only to reveal photography's unsettling character as a mis en abyme, a machine for sending images into infinite regression. The often ornate frames of the mirrors-as-objects are further bracketed by photography's act of framing. The play between the optically reflective character of mirrors and photography is matched by the tactile opticality of photographic and mirror surfaces - as if a photograph of a mirror could magnify and capture, as it happens, the clumping together of light-altered silvery particles that constitutes the photographic image (in both positive and negative forms) - the end result being a vertiginous sense of looking into the mirror and seeing nothing but the material surface of photography itself.

The shared iconographic identity of mirrors and skulls (and photography, for that matter) as memento mori images is an obvious connection between Pelaquier's and Bailly-Maitre-Grand's work, even as their juxtaposition dramatizes the problematic ways in which the photographic categories of "intimacy," as a means of bringing the world closer, and "enclosure," as a mode of imposing proximity, might collapse into resemblance. The work of these two photographers is also linked by their common interest in photographic practices premised upon photography's concrete realism as a trace or reproduction, but with the ability to produce abstraction at the same time. This reveals the degree to which photography is not only a technology for producing realistic representations but a technology whose representational realism is always already abstract. Such abstraction stems as much from the particular materiality of photographic image-making as from the many devices and processes invented to manipulate the photographic image. To put it another way: in the hands of Pelaquier and Bailly-Maitre-Grand, abstraction becomes (yet another) photographic fact.

The relationship between reality, photography and framing (whether intimate or imprisoning) was considered differently in the works of Didier Pazery and Olivier Morel in "Faces a faces: Portraits de Survivants de la Grande Guerre" ("Faces to Faces: Portraits of Survivors of the Great War") at the Musee de l'Armee, as well as in the images of Sarajevo exhibited by Louis Jammes at galerie du jour agnes b. Initially, "Faces a faces" appears as a conventional photojournalistic collaboration between Pazery, a photographer, and Morel, a reporter, who set out to track down survivors of World War I, interview them and photograph them holding an image of themselves as they were in 1914-1918. The results are 30 portraits and accompanying textual remembrances of men and women ranging in age from 99 to 107 years old who were photographed in their yards, homes and, in one particularly moving image, in a graveyard among the tombstones of the war dead. However straightforward and unadorned these portraits appear, and however cliched the device of the photograph within the photograph might seem at first, the effect is nonetheless powerfully affirmative of photography's iconic authority as an image of history.

By colliding photographic realities, the images provoke questions about what has happened during the in-between time and how much the traces of that time (both the war and the process of living with its memories afterward) might be visible in the faces confronting the camera. At the same time, these images offer a powerful critique of photography's self-conscious address toward history. Despite the commonplace convictions that both faces and photographs contain the past, these images dramatize just how few clues photography might have to offer in reconstructing it. While the photographs seem to conceive history as the counter-punctual play of a photographed "before" and "after," they do nothing so much as dramatize photography's tendency to externalize the "gaps" in memory, a phenomenon that Siegfried Kracauer observed long ago in his seminal essay "Photography."(4) For all their eloquence and poignancy, these photographs cannot tell, for example, either why a man was spared and his comrades not, nor how and when this survivor will finally join his brethren in the graveyard where he now stands. Looking at them, we are left to dwell not only upon our inability to bridge those gaps in memory, but on the historic insufficiency of photography to forge a shared experience capable of forestalling both the devastating enormity of war and its many personal tragedies.

Jammes was already established as a painter when he turned to photography to focus on world catastrophes such as the nuclear devastation of Chernobyl and the civil war that laid waste to Sarajevo. The Sarajevo project began in 1993 with a series of portraits of boys and girls taken on the streets of the city and of corpses in the morgue. Back in his studio, Jammes scratched and drew on the photographic negatives, inscribing words of remembrance and placing wings and halos on the children. He then returned to Sarajevo later in 1993-1994 to install large-scale prints of the altered portraits on the walls of bombed-out buildings. In turn, he photographed the results as a series of desolate landscapes. The Sarajevo images juxtapose layers of photographed reality imposing a sense of history on places where cataclysmic violence has threatened to rupture or erase more slowly accrued lived connections to the past. They intentionally begin from conventional reportage, but Jammes's particular version of "concerned photography" also steps over the self-imposed bounds of straight documentary, speaking through photographic manipulations - what it now may well take for an activist vision to break through the apathetic view of the world many of us have cultivated in the face of the evermore explicit and immediate images of global mayhem displayed with numbing regularity in the contemporary media. In doing so, he also offers a critique of the vast corpus of photographic imagery picturing upturned worlds, foregrounding the problem with photographs of the ruins of war (whether in the aftermath of the American Civil War, the 1871 Paris Commune or the recent strategic bombing of Iraq, to name a few examples). Such photographs threaten to substitute the too-easily aestheticized appearance of broken buildings for the human wreckage often buried within, shifting the terms of debate from human to architectural loss and allowing for a certain forgetting, or glossing over, of the high and often indiscriminate costs of violent conflict. Jammes uses photography to reconjure those human losses, but in his hands, photography also functions as a process of disincarnation and transcendence, a way of seeking grace by haunting those ruins with "angels" whose corporeal remains have been left among the debris.

The conventions of straight documentary photography were also interrogated, in unexpected ways perhaps, in an exhibition of Francois Tuefferd's circus photographs at the Musee des Arts et des Traditions Populaires. Tuefferd was an active professional photographer from the 1930s through the '50s. He also ran a photolab/gallery in Paris, Le Chasseur d'images, where he printed the works of his better known contemporaries including Ilse Bing, Man Ray and Capa. His photographs were recently "rediscovered" in an exhibition at the Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris and in 1994 Tuefferd made a gift of over 100 images of the circus to the Parisian museum charged with the preservation of pre-industrial popular culture in France.(5) The exhibition included a sequence of trapeze artists at work, often seen from below, spotlighted against a dark background so that the illusion of a magic spectacle is kept intact and even heightened by the camera. But far more interesting are the behind-the-scenes views of circus performers applying makeup, practicing, eating, sneaking a quiet moment for a smoke or, in the case of one particular elephant, a good scratch. These photographs are valuable not only for the precious views they offer of a largely outmoded form of entertainment and way of life, but for the odd way they augment the look of Paris in the '20s and '30s as it has become most familiar through the work of Tuefferd's contemporaries. These were the very years during which Paris was self-consciously packaging its modern image as the realm of debonair philosophers and down-and-out urban sophisticates with berets, cigarettes and baguettes scattered about, their world-weariness seen through the often monstrous cruelty of camera vision practiced in a certain way most conspicuously by Brassai. In the place of an intrusive mode of photography that potentially leaves everybody looking like clowns and freaks, Tuefferd, at the same historical moment, offered an intimate view of what clowns and freaks might really look like, suggesting just where that quintessentially Parisian "pose" of a theater of the absurd might have had its roots, and just what other possibilities might arise when marginalized and deliberately archaized subjects are approached with a tenderness toward their individual physiognomies and a respect for their traditional metiers. One of the still camera's gifts is an ability not only to approximate the abrupt cut across time's continuum, but to contain the slower, artisanal time of traditional forms of everyday life before they cease to exist or are entirely transfigured. Tuefferd's vision of this time "lapse" is better characterized as a lingering caress than a rude stare.

Finally, as numerous critics have pointed out, the "Mois de la Photo" is not without its opportunistic side, especially in its efforts to coopt a mantle of authority by creating a false perception of the concentration of photographic activity in Paris. In the context of such criticism, it seems appropriate to dwell on one of the new centerpieces of the "Mois de la Photo" - the "Paris Photo," in its second year at the Carrousel du Louvre. "Paris Photo" is an international gathering of photography dealers, editors, collectors and even a few photographers themselves. The participants this year were mostly French, but Australian, Dutch, English, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish galleries were also represented. Moreover, even as the new European currency community was being dubbed "Euroland" (whose resonances with "Disneyland" raised predictable French concerns about the Americanization of European culture), "Paris Photo" raised its own specter of an American invasion. A significant North American contingent included 12 New York galleries and several Canadian ones. (And there was heartening news: despite the closure of her Paris exhibition space [see Afterimage 26, no. 3] Virginia Zabriskie was vigorously making the rounds on opening night.) The highlight of the exhibition, supported by the organizers, was a selection of architectural photographs from the Gilman Paper Collection, whose holdings had never before been exhibited in France, but have already been showcased in the United States in the hugely successful traveling exhibition "The Waking Dream." (It should also be noted that two of the most high profile events of the "Mois de la Photo" were the Weegee exhibition, "Le Monde de Weegee," originally organized by the International Center of Photography and on view at the Maison Europeene de la Photographie, and a stunning W. Eugene Smith exhibition at Hotel de Sully.)

As Monterosso has observed, "Paris Photo" provides a necessary commercial anchor for the loftier ambitions of the "Mois de la Photo," by bringing "the right kind" of collectors and dealers to Paris at a time when a critical mass of thematically-vetted work is on display in local galleries. The presence of representatives of DG Bank of Germany, which has recently instituted its own photography collection, was cause for much eager anticipation, but one was left to wonder, as usual, how many young photographers ended up the beneficiaries of such heavy purses. The conceptual ambitiousness of the "Mois de la Photo" was by and large not duplicated at "Paris Photo" itself, where the emphasis focused more on what is currently bankable than what might be adventurous or new. The event exhibited a parade of blue-chip Surrealist work (including a wonderful selection of Kertesz's mirror-distorted nudes); comfortably nostalgic Parisian views and genre scenes by the likes of EugEne Atget, Germaine Krull, Gisele Freund, Brassai, Martine Franck and Doisneau; and more work by those international hot commodities Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin than seemed necessary.

If one had stayed within the confines of "Paris Photo" it would be easy to come away with an impression of contemporary photography weighted toward the side of cruelty and banality, sharpened to a harsh point by the hard commercial logic of making a living selling photographs. There were certain notable exceptions: Jane Corkin of Toronto made an argument for the continued currency of modernist formalism in an exhibition of Robert Bourdeau's images of industrial sites. A series of studio portraits by the West African photographer Seydou Keita exhibited by galerie du jour agnes b. suggested that the apparent inevitability of photography's theorization as urbanized and fully capitalized (by this I refer to both its Paris-New York bias and its commodity sheen) might be challenged by looking elsewhere in the world. A display of 400 mug shots of convicted French anarchists by Alphonse Bertillon from 189394, exhibited by Serge Plantureux, occupied a prominent corner of the concourse with a visual force comparable to an orsini bomb waiting to detonate. But by and large, one was forced to conclude that, in elite photography circles as in popular culture in general, sex and violence still sells, the seamier and disaffected the better, especially if its artiness is bound up in an aesthetics of maximum exposure.

What emerged as most compelling was the degree to which the artificial and cosmetic, eroticized violence of picture-making and viewing seems to ensure the predictable banality of much art photography - and its commercial success. For a critique of this connection, one had to look elsewhere - to an exhibition of photographs by the Spanish artist David Nebreda, mounted by the Galerie Xippas under the auspices of the "Mois de la Photo." Nebreda documented his harrowing descent into schizophrenia in several sequences of powerfully disturbing self-portraits, staring at the camera with a monomaniacal, martyred urgency arguing, among other things, that the effects of supporting a morbid project of mutilation/exposure of one's own body might well be too much to bear. Nebreda's work resonates with fellow Spaniard Salvador Dali's paranoiac-critical method and aligns itself in surface appearances not only with the gruesome photographic theatrics of Joel-Peter Witkin and Cindy Sherman, but the far more sociable practices of S/M documented by Mapplethorpe. By virtue of these very affinities, the isolation and intensity of Nebreda's turn against his own body - through self-starvation, cutting, piercing, electrification, smearing with shit, piss and ashes, the effects of which are rigorously displayed for the camera - also calls into question the ongoing validity of more vicarious practices inaugurated largely by the Surrealists and further perpetrated by their various inheritors.

In effect, the experience of viewing these photographs comes down to the difference between casting the knowing eye of a connoisseur on the stylishly eroticized sadism of a Peter Greenaway film and stumbling unaware upon a snuff film. I do not mean to imply that I would prefer the snuff film because it is more "honest" or "unflinching." Rather, contemplating its existence might provoke rebellion against the casual, aesthetic deployment of ersatz macabre imagery by the cultural avant-garde. The example of Nebreda's work suggests that a more powerful articulation of the goals of a truly contemporary photographic art might be produced by focusing on the difference between how much further the evermore high-rent, hyperrealistic, optical mortification of human flesh might be pushed and, alternatively, the inexhaustible difficulty of finding persuasive, specifically photographic metaphors to convey an understanding of the pain and pleasure of inhabiting such fragile matter as the human body.

NOTES

1. See the current deluxe picture book, Sylviane de Decker, ed., Paris, capitale de la photographie (Paris: Hazan, 1998) as well as the catalog for the recent exhibition, Paris sous l'objectif, 1885-1994 (Paris: Bibliotheque historique de la ville de Paris, 1998).

2. Roselyne Pelaquier, pamphlet (Paris: Galerie Jean-Pierre Lambert, 1998), p. 10.

3. Mois de la Photo a Paris, Novembre 1998, exhibition catalog, 2 vols. (Paris: Paris Audiovisuel/Maison Europeene de la Photographic, 1998), Vol. I, p. 54.

4. Siegfried Kracauer, "Photography" in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, Thomas Y. Levin, trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 50.

5. See the catalog Le Cirque de Francois Tuefferd. Photographies de 1933 a 1954 (Paris: Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1998), which includes a complete inventory.

JEANNENE M. PRZYBLYSKI is an independent photography historian and critic living in San Francisco. Her current projects include a book on photography and the Paris Commune of 1871.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

Mois de la Photo November 1998 Next Scheduled: November 2000 for more information, contact Paris Audiovisuel tel: [phone] fax: [phone]

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