THE VIEW FROM THE MOIS DE LA PHOTO.

Mois de la Photo

Paris, France

October 29-November 26, 2000

So what is it about Paris and photography? To be sure, Paris is one of the places where photography was invented, but what caused it to strike so many as immediately made for the camera--attracting and continuing to attract both homegrown photographers and those from abroad with an obsessiveness matched by few (if any) other urban centers? If this question has haunted the Mois de la Photo, the biennial celebration of photography, co-produced by Paris Audiovisuel, the Maison Europeene de la Photography and the city government, then it was pushed to the foreground when the organizers chose Paris itself as this year's theme. During the month of November and lasting well into December 2000, more than 60 photography exhibitions throughout the city offered their visions of what Patrick Roegiers in his essay for the lavishly illustrated catalog characterizes as the "beacon city, if not to say the global city, of photography." [1]

The temptation to claim an ontological bond between the "City of Light" and the technology to fix light as images is strong. Given that in 1839 Paris already supported a culture in which the positivist pursuit of knowledge through vision frequently blurred into a taste for visual entertainments that presented illusions as if they were real (such as dioramas, panoramas and the like), it might seem that Paris was manifestly destined to be exhaustively remembered, celebrated, documented and diagnosed through the lens of a camera. However, such an observation also imbricates ontology with history, suggesting that the apparent "instantaneity" of the Paris-photography connection was as much a product of the particular angle of interface between the new technology and already existing habits of seeing and negotiating the world as of innate affinities and idealized "essences." In Paris, moreover, the industrial exploitation of photography was given early and enthusiastic support by the government (while the patents jealously guarded by William Henry Fox Talbot hindered photography's commercial infiltration into England), thereby significantly facilitating the degree to which the image of nineteenth-century Paris as fashionable, commodified and "modern" would come to have a distinctively photographic tinge. [2] Nowhere is this more apparent than in the overlap of the iconography of mainstream photographic history with the photographic "branding" of Parisian identity through images of major monuments (the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe), sentimentalized Lieux-de-memoire (arcades, old Parisian streets and cafes) and typical inhabitants (barflies, people smooching, smoking cigarettes and carrying baguettes)--illuminating just how much grand ontological claims can be bound up in the more mundane demands of civic boosterism and the tourism business. In other words, although some complained that the "Parisian" theme ensured that the exhibitions would be by and large historically routine (and inevitably nostalgic), seldom ha s a theme imposed itself as more urgently historical, and seldom has it demanded that we be more self-conscious about those photographic instances when the historical/epistemological and ontological verge on the indistinguishable. [3] This latter tendency may well be, for better or worse, the legacy of Walter Benjamin, whose quest to excavate the prehistory of twentieth-century modernity amidst the material remains of nineteenth-century Paris was intimately related to his conceptualization of the image of history as photography. [4] While French urban historians tend to look upon Benjamin with a certain ambivalence (one author of a major "biography" of Paris declared at a recent conference that he wished Benjamin could be "mettre au placard"--shunted aside, or literally, put "back in the closet"), in ways both spoken and unspoken, the German philosopher and cultural critic haunted this year's exhibitions. [5]

Most obviously, the Benjaminian turn manifested itself in the choice of subtopics. The Archives Nationales, for example, presented a selection from its collection of photographs related to the ambitious Expositions Universelles hosted by Paris throughout the nineteenth century. Benjamin considered these "World's Fairs" to constitute one of the primary "phantasmagorias" of commodity fetishism, and he juxtaposed them to the utopian economics of the followers of the French social theorist and philosopher Charles Fourier and the fantastic images of commodities "come alive" produced by the illustrator Grandville. [6] Following Benjamin, not only did "Paris: Tableaux d'Expositions" demonstrate how closely related were the conventions of photographically representing the modernization of Paris during the Second Empire and the grand construction projects of the Expositions (indeed numerous photographers who photographed the Expositions also profited from the city government's eagerness to commemorate its own public works campaigns). The exhibition also highlighted the affinity of photography and engineering as crucial technologies of modernity. More than one photograph in the exhibit featured a proud group of engineers standing in the midst of the iron scaffolding whose modular assembly was both a product of the rationalization and standardization of modern construction techniques but also the means of concocting ever more ornate and exotic architectural illusions--fantasies of both commodity fetishism and France's imperialist dream of making over the world in the image of itself.

Also in good Benjaminian fashion, the Mois de la Photo featured not one, but two exhibitions related to Paris's famous "arcades"--glass-and-iron covered passageways whose decay functioned, for Benjamin, as a leitmotif of modernity. Settings for numerous scenes in the novels of Honore de Balzac and Emile Zola, and defined for the twentieth-century imagination by Louis Aragon and the Surrealists, the arcades have long been understood to symbolize the permeability of public and private space in Paris. As privately owned thoroughfares lined with shops, they not only offered pedestrian trajectories through the crowded city, they also functioned as ersatz living rooms" for the flaneur or "idle stroller"--a quintessentially Parisian denizen.

At Espace Electra, "Paris, Passages, passe" featured the now canonical photographs of Charles Marville and Eugene Atget, as well as images by the lesser known Charles Lansiaux and the Seeberger brothers. As if to provide mute testimony to the impact of Benjamin, three editions of his monumental and unfinished Passagen-Werk were also displayed-- in German, French and, most recently, in English. At the Marie of the 10th Arrondisement, "Paris, Passages, Present" in turn offered views of the Arrondisement's own perennially tatty Passage Brady, as well as the newly restored Passages des Panoramas and Jouffroy, the new Carrousel du Louvre and the somewhat new Les Halles (see if it makes you feel any better when you are caught in these shopping malls to think of them as "passages," or to wonder what Benjamin would have made of Ie Gap). Most striking were the ways in which the documentarian's view of the passages has changed. A fascinating early twentieth-century image by Lansiaux carefully aligned a modern gas lamp with the dim portal to the Passage Panorama, a modern automobile flanking it on one side and a kiosk advertising the "Cinema Pathe" on the other. The photograph manages to suggest the degree to which the passages did more than provide a way through the perennially blocked circulation of the surface streets. They also made the city legible to itself, serving as the place where one might go to experience such new-fangled visual pleasures as panoramas, wax museums and cinema, and also comprising a modern visual technology in their own right--something like the dark chamber of a camera obscura in which a certain, distorted view of the city was reflected.

In contrast, the much more recent images of the arcades made by the 2000 graduating class of the Centre IRIS, a professional photography school in Paris, tended to cast a connoisseur's eye on 'antique" details (an elegant old light fixture or bit of molding) to emphasize transparency as much as enclosure (the view outside seen through the iron and glass roofs), or to focus on moments of transition from outer to inner spaces (the joining of worn stone step to equally worn mosaic floor, or the fit of iron and glass roof to stone wall). Though often beautiful, these bits and pieces conspired to package the arcades as a collage of reified "souvenirs," doing more to affirm Benjamin's view of the arcades as museums/mausoleums of consumer culture than to align themselves with ongoing civic initiatives to revitalize the arcades as particularly contemporary urban forms.

In comparison to those exhibitions that seemed to toe the Benjaminian line, one of the more radical updates of the photographic view of "historical Paris" was provided by a concise and beautifully curated exhibition at the Archives de Paris. The "Paris La Rue: Un Autre 1900" exhibit drew upon an immense collection of views of Parisian streets commissioned by the city from the Union photographique francaise to document yet another period of modernization in Paris--this one begun after the city had recovered from the debts accrued during the Second Empire and repaired the damages resulting from the suppression of the revolutionary Commune of 1871. Modernization in the early twentieth-century was not so fixated on perpetuating the notorious system of monumental intersections and "pierced" boulevards lined with upscale apartment buildings that was masterminded by the Second Empire's Baron von Haussmann. Instead, 1900 saw a number of diverse projects to improve the circulation and sanitation in all quarters of th e city (it was during this period, for example, that the first lines of the metropolitan subway system were constructed-their construction was also documented by the Union [7]).

Curator Jean--Philippe Dumas argues that, unlike the didactic "before and after" images of modernization made by Marville during the most intense period of "Haussmannization," and equally unlike Atget's ubiquitous images of an eerily empty modern Paris saturated with nostalgia, these images show a city without "miserabilisme," melancholy or aesthetic pretension. [8] Paris in 1900, the photographs demonstrate, encompassed both old and new: it was a thoroughly urban city that still contained pockets of the countryside, a city where traditional workshops and boutiques did business under a growing thicket of handbills and billboards for the latest mass produced goods, a "popular" Paris of working class hangouts and homes that continued to coexist with the "modern" Paris of the Universal Expositions, art nouveau and the grands boulevards. Not coincidentally, as workaday commercial photographers, the cameramen of the Union were more "of" than apart from the hybridized, traditionally artisanal but newly industriali zing city they were commissioned to record. Their photographs make vivid the degree to which Paris was not only one of the great metropolises in 1900, it also remained a network of villages where people lived and worked in comfortable familiarity, despite the ongoing impact of modernization, and where they were just as available to being photographically recorded by the Union as everyday fixtures of the Parisian street as they were susceptible to being strategically effaced by the cameras of Marville and Atget.

An equally revisionist exhibition, both in its exploration of an often overlooked technology and the history of Paris, and in the circus-style excitement of its installation, was mounted by the Musee Carnavalet. "Paris en 3D, de la stereoscopie a la realite virtuelle" traced the development of three-dimensional photography from its precursors in illusionistic toys, through daguerreotype, glass plate and cabinet card images, to holograms and virtual reality installations. A stunning and effective exhibition design by "Architecture Studio" allowed visitors to experience hundreds of images of the city and its inhabitants in 3D effect, and the catalog came stuffed with little devices to activate the illusions in its pages. [9] Not since a much smaller exhibition mounted by the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BNF) several years ago has there been such an opportunity to follow the historical development of a technology that is often regarded as being photography's more frivolous (and not coincidentally more comm ercial) relation. [10] Among the many items of interest was a "kaiserpanorama," newly constructed by the Stereo-Club Francais, in which three-dimensional images of contemporary Paris whizzed past peepholes provided for individually seated viewers. For those desiring a more practical knowledge of the conditions of perceptual modernity that have been so effectively theorized by Jonathan Crary, among others, the exhibition was essential. [11] But for all the quaint thrill of experiencing these historical and often kitschy curiosities, "Paris en 3D" struck me as one of the most forward-looking exhibitions featured in the Mois de la Photo, facilitating the beginning of an understanding of how deeply our ideas of the images we are prepared to accept as "virtually real" have been determined by these earlier prototypes for conceptualizing as much as reproducing the world in relief.

If as a historical exercise "Paris en 3D" ended by suggesting that "everything old is new again," it likewise seemed that the most engaging contemporary exhibitions were those in which the artists used old and outmoded technology to novel effect. The Institut Polonais featured an exhibition of the work of Bogdan Konopka entitled "Paris en gris." Konopka has made a habit of trudging through the streets of Paris with a heavy view camera and tripod (and no permit from the local police to set it up, although one was required in Paris until 1996). [12] Like a modern-day Atget, Konopka tends to see Paris as unmonumental and anti-heroic, an intimiste's collection of deserted out-of-the-way nooks and crannies that seem best characterized as "scenes of crimes." But Konopka's decision to key his images to the middle range of the gray scale imposes a slowness to the experience of viewing them that seems to push their ostensibly documentary requirements for stillness and immobility into a different register of expressio n altogether. Paris is cast against type--not a city of light, but a city of shadows, whose tenebrous monotony is only broken by a small and lovely sequence of photographs depicting nighttime views of the Quai Montebello and the Quai d'Orleans under snow, extending a few fleeting moments in 1995 into an eternity where the peeling surfaces of the city are covered with an unbroken layer of glistening, confectionery white.

In contrast, Ilan Wolff's exhibition at the Cite Internationale des Arts used the even slower and more antiquated technology of the camera obscura to create dynamic, almost abstract images of such familiar Parisian sights as the Eiffel Tower and Les Invalides. Wolff had experimented for several years with small stenoscopes made from his vast collection of canisters that once held everything from food to bottles of scotch, before converting his Renault van into a rolling "stenope" in 1997. Since then, he has concentrated on refining the hybrid medium he has dubbed the "stenogramme" -- a combination of the stenographic views of the city outside the van and the photogram-like images of his body imposed on the large-format sheets of photosensitive paper he exposed inside it. Work such as that by Wolff and Konopka is part of a much larger contemporary trend toward photographic Luddism, with artists experimenting with daguerreotypes, photograms, pinhole cameras and the like in the face of the perceived loss of aes thetic texture and hand-craftedness betokened by cutting-edge digital technology. [13] But it also underscores to just what technical extremes one might have to resort in the "new millennium" in order to continue to imaginatively inhabit "traditional" Paris.

To find a more contemporary Paris, one had to look elsewhere--almost, it seemed, beyond the bounds of photography proper. At the Centre Culturel Suisse, "ParisGodard, la ville, la politique le langage" focused on two Parisian films by the celebrated auteur of la nouvelle vague. In installations combining still photographs, texts, sound and objects, Jen-Luc Godard's futuristic fantasy Alphaville (1965), and his profile of an urban housewife-turned-prostitute Deux ou trois chases que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1966), were "adapted" for the museum--just as, explained curator Christian Longchamp, one speaks of adapting a novel for film. Among other things, the "Alphaville" installation featured a cup of coffee and a box of Prozac, while construction scaffolding and crumpled papers printed with various synonyms of the word desire appeared in the "Deux ou trois choses" installation.

If in these films Godard seemed intent upon exploring some of the darker sides of Paris, he did so by simultaneously calling into question the appearance of film as a seamless illusion--exposing the structural relationships between images, sound, text and material facts of the world as captured on film and audio tape. Longchamp's installations, in this respect, did more than make you want to see the films again (although they did that very effectively). They also parsed Godard's cinematic deconstructions of Paris in a way comparable to the effect Roland Barthes sought to define when he located the most filmic aspect of film in the film still (which in its frozen detachment from the sequentiality of film images unlocks film's deep structure precisely because it is proximate to, but not of filmic movement). [14] Walking around these installations (which were not films but also not precisely simulacra of Paris) presented the opportunity to re-experience Alphaville and Deux ou trois chases as almost excessively cinematic, even as their piecemeal evocation of the city reproduced the quest for the relevatory fragment that also deeply informed Godard's cinema.

It might be argued that what the passages and streets of old Paris were to the collective imagination of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the architectural interventions of the Mitterand era (La Defense, L'Opera de la Bastille, La Villette, the new BNF, to name a few) may well be to the twenty-first. Both new and already showing signs of decay and obsolescence, one has only to stand on the windswept ramparts of the BNF to sense something of the agoraphobia with which denizens of Second Empire Paris might have confronted the sweeping new expanses of Haussmann's grands boulevards. Certainly, one possibility would be to revel in the slick geometry and space-age forms that seemed most to Mitterand's taste. This was exactly the move made by Arnaud Baumann, whose exhibition of large-format color prints of the exterior spaces of the BNF at the Espace Meyer Zafra sought to capitalize on the incidental play of tinted light and reflections on the BNF's glass surfaces, its bold graphics and the irony of the quixotically diminutive humans dwarfed by its inscrutable spaces, but ended by dramatizing the limits of Mitterand's particular brand of architectural utopianism. In contrast, Victor Burgin's video meditation entitled Nietzche's Paris (1999-2000), on view at Galerie Lilliane et Michel Durand-Dessert, brilliantly conjured the paradox between the persistent desire for a humane city and the largely inhumane forms of Paris's "Mitterandization." Inspired by Nietzsche's correspondence with Lou Salome, in which a plan for a Parisian menage trois of philosophical and friendly relations with Salome's friend Paul Ree was discussed, only to be abandoned when Salome and Ree abruptly left town without telling Nietzsche, Burgin engineers a stunning juxtaposition between architectural rationality and the disruption of desire by focusing on the grimly empty grisaille of the new BNF's facade. A black screen across which runs the phrase "J'a vu un agreable cabinet de travail rempli de livres et de fleurs entre deux cham bres a coucher" ["] envisioned a pleasant little office, filled with books and flowers, situated between two bedrooms"] gives way to the rhythmic juxtaposition of a static image of a mysterious and beautiful woman waiting in a garden followed by a swirling panoramic scan of the BNF's sterile entrance plaza. Never has the feeling of emptiness been woven so hauntingly through the institutional forms of contemporary public architecture. You can bet that if Godard were filming Alphaville today, at least part of it would be set at the new BNF.

Finally, Paris would not be Paris without controversies. In the great tradition of French avant-gardes, the Mois de la Photo also produced its refuses. A placard posted at the Maison des photographes announced that its current exhibition of the Parisian photographs of Jean-Francois Fernandes had been denied the prestigious imprimatur (and considerable free publicity) of being "dans le cadre du Mois de la Photo" (under the aegis of the Mois de la Photo). Fernandes's gritty and uncomfortable photographs of clochards (winos) and the sans abri (homeless) were, as the photographer himself observed, "not Doisneau or Broubat"--in other words, the more typically Parisian fare of photogenic down-and-outers loitering picturesquely on the quais or cadging a smoke on the grands boulevards was nowhere to be found in these photographs.

Not knowing what else failed to make the final cut, t is difficult to judge the validity of Fernandes's assertion that the Mois de la Photo's organizers wanted to see only a Paris "progressively reserved for the bourgeoisie." Thumbing through the catalog, however, the dearth of images of Paris's immigrant populations, of the brutally decaying, postwar modernity of its banlieus (alien territory to most tourists), and of the ongoing radical transformation of the peripherique is difficult to ignore. I also wonder why, for example, the Musee d'Orsay's compelling exhibition of Paris occupied by the revolutionary Commune of 1871 was not coordinated with the Mois de la Photo, or why an extensive exhibition on the barricades of May 1968 featured in the 1998 Mois de la Photo could not have found a more appropriate frame in this year's edition? [15] Some of this is explained away by the vagaries of scheduling and planning across so many institutions with potentially competing priorities and time frames, but some of it may be mixed up in the public relations game of representing Paris to itself and the world. Intentional or not, these absences and missed opportunities suggest a sort of cordon sanitaire between the dominant view of a cohesive, camera-ready Paris and more explicitly politicized and explicitly contested photographic visions of the city. Godard and Burgin aside, you had to look hard through the offerings of this year's Mois de la Photo to find a Paris that admitted to discord and discontent. In this context, even the aforementioned "Paris La Rue" exhibition, with its images of happy and enfranchised workers holding their own in the midst of urban transformation, takes on another level of meaning when juxtaposed to the current Parisian realities of ongoing strikes, rising crime and increasingly visible homelessness related at least in part to the pressures of blending into the EU, and the uncertainties of entering into the new "global" culture inaugurated not by photography but by the Internet.

Speaking of the impact of the Internet, with many photographers and galleries in San Francisco, Chicago, New York and other places facing escalating real estate costs largely attributed to the technology boom, not to mention years of neglectful funding for the arts and ideological clashes of the "culture wars," it may be hard to resist a pang of jealousy at President of Paris Audiovisuel Henry Chapier's claim that in Paris, City Hall's unstinting financial backing and support for creative freedom has given French photography "a considerable leg up." [16] But there are signs that even Paris, like its American counterparts, is struggling hard to juggle the costs and benefits of "la nouvelle economie," and its attendant pressures of gentrification and displacement. At the time of this writing, the esteemed Galerie Agathe Gaillard, a showcase for photography for the last 25 years and a pioneering commercial venture on the rue du Pont-Louis-Philippe (which, even at its inception in 1975, was struggling against co mmercial powers), was under threat of eviction to make way for yet another restaurant on the now trendy street. Mme. Gaillard has vowed to fight. Whether she will prevail to celebrate another Mois de la Photo in her accustomed coin de Paris remains to be seen.

JEANNENE M. PRZYBLYSKI is a photography historian and critic living in San Francisco. Her forthcoming publications include The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, co-edited with Vanessa Schwartz.

NOTES

(1.) Patrick Roegiers, Les 400 coups du bal de la seine ou l'exaltante epopee de Paris gagne par la photographie," in Jean-Luc Monterosso, et. al., Mois de la photo a Paris, novembre 2000, Catalogue general (Paris: Maison Europeene de la Photographie-Paris Audiovisuel, 2000), p. 69.

(2.) On this point, see Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-1871 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

(3.) For example, Michel Frizet, "Le Cinema, mieux que la photographie?" Journal des arts No. 116 (December 1-14, 2000), p. 7.

(4.) This connection has been beautifully elucidated by Eduardo Cadava. See Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

(5.) Pierre Pinon, Paris. Biographie d'un capitale (Paris: Hazan, 1999). A selection of the proceedings of the conference in question has been anthologized. See Karen Bowie, ed., La Modernite avant Haussmann: Formes de l'espace urbain a Paris 1801-1853 (Paris: Editions recherches, 2001), which includes an essay on Paris and daguerreotype photography by the author.

(6.) Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," in The Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughin, trans. (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press. 1999), pp. 17-19.

(7.) See the exhibition catalog published by the Bibliotheque administrative de la Ville de Paris, Vincennes-Maillot. La Construction de la ligne 1 du Metropolitan (1898-1900) (Paris: Paris Bibliotheques, 1998).

(8.) Jean-Philippe Dumas, Paris La Rue: Un Autre 1900 (Paris: Archives de Paris/Paris Musees, 2000), p. 19.

(9.) Francoise Reynaud, et. al., Paris en 3D: de la stereoscopie A la realite virtuelle, 1850-2000 (Paris: Paris Musees, 2000).

(10.) Denis Pellerin, La Photographie stereoscopique sous le Second Empire (Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale de France, 1995).

(11.) See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990) and, more recently, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). This latter book features a kaiser-panorama on its cover.

(12.) Szary Paryz, Bogdan Konopka: Paris en gris (Lublin: Editions de l'Universite Marie Curie-Sklodowska, 2000).

(13.) For other examples, see the photographic work featured in Melissa E. Feldman and Ingrid Schaffner, Secret Victorians: Contemporary Artists and a 19th century Vision (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 1998).

(14.) See Roland Barthes, "The Third Meaning" in Susan Sontag, ed., A Barthes Reader (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p.317-333.

(15.) Quentin Bajac, et. al., La Commune photographiee (Paris: Editions de la Reunion des musees nationaux, 2000). Ferit Duzyol, curator. Goksin Sipahioglu: Un Regard sur les barricades, Galerie Audiberti/Theatre du Rond-Point des Champs-Elysees, Paris (October 26-November 22,1998).

(16.) Henry Chapier, "Les vingt ans du Mois de la Photo," in Mois de la Photo, p. 6.