The View From The Mois De La Photo

Mois de la Photo

Paris, France

October 29-November 26 2000

thus what is it about Paris and photography? To be certain Paris is one of the places where photography was invented, on the other hand what caused it to strike thus many as immediately made for the camera--attracting and continuing to attract the pair homegrown photographers and those from abroad with an obsessiveness matched by dint of few (if any) other urban centers? If this question has haunted the Mois de la Photo, the biennial celebration of photography, co-produc by the agency of Paris Audiovisuel, the Maison Europeene de la Photography and the city regulation 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 over 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 ligament between the "City of Light" and the technology to fix light as images is hardy Given that in 1839 Paris already supported a tillage in which the positivist pursuit of knowledge from one side vision frequently blurred into a taste for visual entertainments that at handed illusions as if they were real (such as dioramas, panoramas and the like), it might present the appearance that Paris was manifestly destined to be exhaustively remembered, celebrated, documented and diagnosed from one side the lens of a camera. However, similar an observation also imbricates ontology with history, suggesting that the apparent "instantaneity" of the Paris-photography connection was as plenteous a product of the particular angle of interface between the of recent origin 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 dint of the government (while the patents jealously guarded by the agency of William Henry Fox Talbot hindered photography's commercial infiltration into England), thereby significantly facilitating the stage to which the image of nineteenth-century Paris as fashionable, commodified and "modern" would advance 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 from one side images of major monuments (the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe), sentimentalized Lieux-de-memoire (arcades, aged Parisian streets and cafes) and typical inhabitants (barflies, nation smooching, smoking cigarettes and carrying baguettes)--illuminating just by what mode much grand ontological claims can be border up in the more mundane demands of civic boosterism and the tourism business. In other words, although more [i]or[/i] less complained that the "Parisian" theme ensur that the exhibitions would be through and large historically routine (and inevitably nostalgic), seldom ha s a theme imposed itself as more vehemently historical, and seldom has it demanded that we be more self-conscious about those photographic instances when the historical/epistemological and ontological rod on the indistinguishable. [3] This latter turn may well be, for better or worse, the legacy of Walter Benjamin, whose search 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 wait on to look upon Benjamin with a certain ambivalence (one author of a major "biography" of Paris declared at a novel conference that he wished Benjamin could be "mettre au placard"--shunted aside, or literally, deposit "back in the closet"), in ways one as well as the other spoken and unspoken, the German philosopher and cultural critic haunted this year's exhibitions. [5]

greatest in quantity obviously, the Benjaminian turn manifested itself in the choice of subtopics. The Archives Nationales, for example, at handed a selection from its collection of photographs related to the ambitious Expositions Universelles entertainered by Paris throughout the nineteenth hundred Benjamin considered these "World's Fairs" to constitute single 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" produc through the illustrator Grandville. [6] Following Benjamin, not sole did "Paris: Tableaux d'Expositions" demonstrate by what means closely related were the conventions of photographically representing the modernization of Paris during the next to the first Empire and the grand construction casts of the Expositions (indeed numerous photographers who photographed the Expositions also profited from the city government's eagerness to commemorate its be in possession of public works campaigns). The exhibition also highlighted the affinity of photography and engineering as crucial technologies of modernity. More than individual photograph in the exhibit featured a egotistical group of engineers standing in the midst of the iron scaffolding whose modular assembly was the one and the other a product of the rationalization and standardization of present construction techniques but also the means of concocting at any time more ornate and exotic architectural illusions--fantasies of one as well as the other commodity fetishism and France's imperialist dream of making above the world in the image of itself.