Mois de la photo - various photographers, various galleries, Paris, France

Afterimage, March-April, 1999 by Jeannene M. Przyblyski

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).