Métamorphose: La photographie en France

From then on, it would be the adventure of authors, and the quest for more literary and artistic models - which did not prevent social or political commitment. From then on, photography aspired to become a means of expression in its own right. After the newspaper page, it is the museum picture rail or the page of the artist's book that forges its legitimacy.

To meet the challenge of creation, French photographers reinvented the very idea of photography, changing both format and subject.
The model of American photography imposed itself, as in music and cinema. But this "influence" met with a photographic milieu in the throes of reflection. What would later be called "French theory" (philosophy, human sciences and language) enriched the debates and inspired the photographers. Between the end of the 1960s and the 1980s - symbolically between two historical moments, May '68 and the fall of the Berlin Wall - photography no longer resembled the so-called "humanist" photography that had been seen in France until then. Both more subjective and more intellectual, the 1970s and 1980s were the years of a generation that saw the entry of photography into contemporary art. Formats exploded, colour became the norm, and aesthetics became the primary concern. Institutions were born, such as the Centre national de la photographie: photography had conquered its autonomy, in the same way as theatre, literature or cinema. But it remains the great medium of reality. The photographers carry out a determined action
to represent a country that was gradually emerging from the Glorious Thirty and facing the time of economic crises.
At a time when photography had to gain legitimacy, each work became a manifesto: more than an image, photography had become a culture.

Michel Poivert, curator of the exhibition

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