The View From The Mois De La Photo

Afterimage, March, 2001 by Jeannene M. Przyblyski

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.