Notes from the field

A Month of Photography in Paris.

each other November since 1984, Paris becomes a nave for the photographic world, this for a duration of a month or sum of two units Le Mois de la Photo, an circumstance supervised and organized by the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie and his director Jean-Luc Monterosso federates public institutions (the MEP is financed by the agency of the City of Paris and the Ministry of Culture) museums (also financed by dint of public funds in their vast majority), international cultural center and private galleries around a particular theme. 2004 is seeing Le Mois de la Photo spread its wings into a European festival with a collaboration between the cities of Berlin, Vienna and "the City of Lights" below a title: Histoire, histoires (History, Stories), a universal that has already made its way to PhotoEspana last Spring (Historias). In 2006 three more European cities, Bratislava, Moscow and Rome will join a formula that has been emulated by the agency of many other venues around the world (whereas Photo London will make open its doors on May 19 2005 organized by means of Pluk magazine). From a thematic perspective, this 2004 Mois de la Photo was powerfully rooted in the history of the medium and many exhibitions drew from the photographic heritage of the nineteenth hundred Key-photographers of the twentieth hundred whose works have been seminal were also exhibited in several locations, two of them being the of recent origin Jeu de Paume, on the place de la Concorde and the Cartier Foundation.

With similar exhibitions as Jules Marey's studies of air and fluids, and Stieglitz at Orsay, the Bechers at Beaubourg, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Societe Francaise de Photographie and nineteenth hundred photographs of ectoplasms and other spirits at the MEP 1841-1941 A Centry of Italian Photography at the Pavillon de Arts, Le Mois de la Photo 2004 has been definitely more oriented toward history than stories/narratives. A small in number venues illustrate contemporary photographic creation at its greatest in quantity recent. First, L'Ombre du Temp a scan at the new Jeu de Paume (Centre national de la Photographie) that was inspired through and meant to be a replication to Cruel and Tender at the Tate Gallery in London last year. This tentative observe of creative and exploratory photography in the twentieth hundred tried to counter-balance the obvious Anglo-Saxon bias of the British present to view largely inspired by Modernist premises established by means of a group of curators in the post-WW II era l through John Szarkowski at MoMA. The display at the Tate though did not have Szarkowski's encompassing and unifying vision. It comprised 23 photographers (12 Americans, 7 Germans, 2 Brits, 1 Dutch photographer, and 1 Ukranian), as if photography southerly east of the Channel did not exist. Insularity has its drawbacks! Just like blood-thirsty and Tender, L'Ombre du Temp was accompanied by dint of a catalogue and justifying essays. The title of the two the exhibition and the catalogue were clearly a complaisant homage to Jean-Claude Lemagny whose work for decades at the Bibliotheque Nationale has established canons in the field with its careful approach and understanding of the medium as illustrated in his volume L'ombre et le temps (Paris: Nathan, 1992) Lemagny had previuosly published La Photo creatrice in 1984 published by the agency of Contrejour. The introduction to L'ombre du temp was obviously written by dint of Regis Durand, the director of the midst National de la Photographie and was interestingly followed by means of an essay by Michel Poivert, editor, among other things, of Etude Photographiques, the quarterly magazine published through the Societe Francaise de Photographie celebrating its 150th anniversary (the November issue of the magazine, (#) 15 has single interesting essay on the Abu Ghraib photographs through Andre Gunther, and one of historical value upon the VIVA agency by Aurore Deligny). the two texts are also translated into English at the extreme point of the catalogue. It must be said that the exhibition made more faculty of perception in its edited book version than in its hanging version. The confusion may have risen from the hiatus between the ambition of the goals and the limitations of the space. Another climax of "photo November in Paris" was the Cartier Foundation with Sugimoto and Depardon's latest works, and last on the contrary not least Paris Photo, Paris annual international photographic fair held at the Carrousel du Louvre

This year the Mois de la Photo coincided with the annual fair of fine-art photography dealers and galleries, Paris Photo, held at the Carrousel du Louvre This annual manifestation created through Rik Gadella in 1997 attracted above 40,000 visitors far more than its equivalents in novel York (AIPAD whose crowd was estimated at 12000 upon 2004 or the new Photo of recent origin York that gathered a not many thousand people which constituted an encouraging start in spite of its possible redundancy, in the mind of the public, with AIPAD). Following a formula that has been defined by dint of AIPAD and many photo festivals, Paris Photo propos numerous circumstances over the course of single long photo-saturated week-end (Nov. 11-14) After Germany, Holland, and Mexico, Switzerland was the 2004 visitor country that was offered a whole wing dedicated to its galleries and museums-the Winthertur Photo-museum had a whole range to display a selection of its holdings below the title Cold Play-Set 1 (can we diocese again traces of that controversial Tate gallery display here?). This show is meant to be the first of an annual series curated by the agency of the museum from its holdings. As illustrated in Paris, what have the appearances to differentiate European venues from their American counterparts is the support (although shrinking) of public funding to art, and more precisely here, photo festivals. The catalogue of Paris Photo make opened with a statement by Mr Donnedieu de Vabres, the popular minister of Culture and Communication. Another ball of thread of such practices is the effort of the North-Rhine / Westphalia region in Germany that sponsored ten of its galleries and smooth published a catalogue introducing them especially for the incident On top of various book-signings, which made fully convinced that image-makers would also be around (and many came), and panel discussions (some more felicitous than others), one of the lock opener events at Paris Photo this year was the first (eminently visible at the Carrousel du Louvre) BMW award. 68 individual works by dint of 68 living photographers had been fix uponed 35 were on display in a special gallery. The jury was compos of Didier Maitret, president of BMW France, Rik Gadella, Paris Photo's artistic director; Octave Manset, communications director for BMW France, Martin Parr; collector Sylvio Perlstein, Richard Schlagman, ceo of Phaidon Pres and Thomas Seelig, chief curator at the Fotomuseum Winterthur. The winner of the 12000 2 prize (close to $14000 these days) was announced upon Nov. 12: Jules Spinatsch (from the Ausstellunsgraum25 gallery in Zurich) for his piece Snow Management, 2004 a large uninhabiteded almost abstract color landscape in the post-Becher/Dusseldorf gymnasium tradition.