By studying the mutations of photography since its origins, we realize that, contrary to what we often believe, it exalts artifice, fiction and imagination, strong in its anti-naturalist aesthetic. And if the XIXe century was the matrix of our artistic modernity ?
If photography frees itself from physiognomic, political or scientific interests, then it becomes “ creative “.
Walter Benjamin
Like Walter Benjamin, who analyzes the XIXe century in the light of the young XXe century, Virginia Woolf points out in her memoirs that retrospective, historical writing must “ include the present – at least, enough of the present time to make it a platform to stand on ”, emphasizing that the past is “ significantly affected by the present moment “. The same dialectical impulse animates Michel Poivert’s essay which, rereading the origins of photography in the light of contemporary digital images, offers a cultural history of the medium which moves backwards, in order to better see how the The photographic image has been educating the eye and thinking since its invention.
Backed by a venerable critical tradition, its Brief history of photography holds as much of the Brief History of the World of Ernst Gombrich that of A brief history of photography by Walter Benjamin. It combines scientific rigor and intellectual freedom to question the power that digital photography has to overturn our conception of a system of representation and to reveal an entire history that has remained unnoticed.
Performed/performative image
The first intuition is that, with all the interventions it authorizes and its capacity to easily twist reality, the digital effect contests and calls into question the naturalization of photography, its perception as an image. natural “. And, in the same movement, it highlights its constructed part, its ontological anti-naturalism. Something “ is located in front of and behind the lens » (p. 196), a scene is accomplished in the image, the fruit of a vision or a staging. The image is performed.
Digital photography makes it possible to construct a representation, an imagined, imaginary space. It also authorizes the critic to reconsider the work of marginalized and little-recognized pioneers who, at the origins of photographic practice and then throughout its brief history, thought, designed and manufactured their images. Therefore, it is a matter of understanding that “ looking at a photograph consists first of recognizing how it is foreign to natural perception » (p. 15). Through the image, the photographer constructs a representation whose proximity to reality is eminently variable.
It follows that the photographic image is a matter of imagination. Considered as “ made of conscience », it establishes itself as an exploratory space, a place of sometimes unbridled experimental inventiveness. Actions, gestures, bodies and faces are staged, dramatized to defamiliarize reality and provoke a reaction. Because, reversible, the performed image becomes performative. The photograph triggers a unique reaction in the viewer, which solicits sensitivity and intelligence: rather than “ socket “, she is a “ Don » addressed to those who watch it.
With the freedom of perspective granted to him by the images he examines, Poivert adds a historiographical dimension to his analysis of constructed images. “ Photography has never been a naturalistic art and yet it has never been understood otherwise » (p. 195). To review the production of those forgotten by canonical history is to call into question a dominant discourse on the naturalness of photography. From chapter to chapter, the historian confronts and brings into dialogue the utilitarian and meditative conceptions of the latter ; it puts into tension the two regimes of images which are the recording and the falseness of the representation. Promoting anti-naturalist practices and aesthetics, it traces the history of a counter-culture, even a transgressive anti-discipline.
THE “ poetic device of the image »
At the crossroads of art, techniques and politics, the daguerreotype was celebrated by Arago as a new “ social art », accessible to all. From 1839, a new visual culture was born which established the “ dogma of utility » to the detriment of the production of works of imagination. The utopia of the time, that of an art without technique, which would show the world as it is, innervated a collective imagination enslaving art to “ evil genius of precision without creativity » (pp. 28-30).
As a counterpoint, Poivert affirms and claims the fact that technique encourages reflection on the nature of representations ; he values what Régis Durand calls the “ thought-photography “, either “ a photograph that gives something to thought through the visible “. Through the evocation of personal memories, precious moments when he packed fragile Daguerreian mirrors in the back of the French Society of Photography, the historian reveals the dreamy, creative and contemplative dimension of a medium which knows how to convert its technical virtues into aesthetic means.
With meticulous detail, he returns to Bayard’s theatrical creations, the forgery aesthetic of the tableaux vivants, the theatricalization of the appearances of certain portraits signed Nadar and the impurity of pictorialism, to show how photography is a permanent invention. He insists on the reflexivity of a medium which exalts voluntary artifice, fiction and the imagination, on the intermediality of approaches which do not shy away from pose and costume, nor from retouching. Poivert thus dares to suggest that theatricality imposes itself as “ an essential dimension of the history of photography » (p. 194). Between reality and fiction, the images he explores replay the dialectic of reason and the irrational and thereby establish the reign of interpretation.
We delight in the pages devoted to scientific iconography, true “ reservoir of forms for the avant-garde », and to the surrealist explorations which make mass images the basis of their iconoclastic representations. Reworks, diversions and montages, associations and displacements of forms are celebrated and give rise to new aesthetics between scientific technique and the projection of fantasies. Avant-garde or not, the photographers of XIXe century and the beginning of XXe century divert scholarly or popular images to reveal their poetic charge. Photography is already establishing itself as a “ poetic device of the image » (p. 44).
Two historical turning points
The panorama offered by this Brief history brings the photographic medium into the great family of images. Weaving his text with fruitful back and forth between ancient forms and other ultra-contemporary ones, Poivert probes the construction of a visual culture which continues to question us and fuel certain aesthetic debates (the image “ androgynous » of which Foucault speaks), ethics (the taboo of retouching) or politics (ideological instrumentalization of images).
Between past and present, at the conjunction of times, he detects the same sense of the experimental, of the attempt and of daring ; an always strong desire to reinterpret reality, to challenge the viewer to question their perception of the world. And, therefore, the teacher, always keen to support his reader, as one teaches a child to ride a bike – remaining close, supportive – demonstrates that “ the historical distance between the principles of photography and its contemporary practice is not irreducible, on the contrary » (p. 13).
Served by a sober and elegant layout, the chapters are spread out chronologically, taking up the history of the origins of photography and its pillar inventors (Nièpce, Daguerre, Talbot and Bayard) to better underline two historical turning points signifying the condition modern of this art of technical reproducibility ; a modernity that Poivert strives to inscribe in history.
The first break occurred with the avant-garde flattening of the photographic language and a remodernization of photography at the dawn of the XXe century. With the straight photography American and Dada innovations, photographic practice throws down the values of Art and academicism to impose itself as a new artistic paradigm and structure itself around a “ double value of social document and formal invention » (p. 136). Between art and culture, art and document, photography articulates a new historical identity that surrealist experiments and their exploitation of an entire vernacular corpus will embody.
After the historical density concentrated by the turning point of XXe century until the 1930s, Poivert took a leap forward, jumping over the Second World War, to focus on the emblematic figure of the photoreporter and the challenges of photojournalism. In support of aesthetic debates (confusion of reality and its representations), ethics (what photographic morality in the face of horror, conflicts ?) and institutional (museum consecration of images rather than authors), he analyzes the current tendency to produce an aestheticized photojournalism which hangs on the walls of museums in spectacular formats, thereby transforming current images into a picture of history and playing on the reversibility of documentary and theater to produce “ images played » (p. 194). The circle is closed.
The legacy of XIXe century
Brief, but dense and always accurate, this new little history of photography retraces the story of the personal and intellectual journey of its author, that of a sensitive perception and a theoretical apprehension which have sharpened over the years. Taking its source from a personal experience and a teaching practice, this essay reflects the vibration of a thought in movement. The author shows his approach as a historian at work, as if the reflexivity intrinsic to the medium studied inevitably implied a reflexivity of writing.
In this sense, we find in this opus the defining features of his Benjaminian ancestor. Brief history of photography aims to be both a demanding popularization and a stimulating synthesis ; she questions her relationship to history as much as to historiography ; and through it, its author knows how to use his intimacy, he knows how to make the reader penetrate “ within the restricted perimeter of (his) imagination » (p. 47). Concerned with observing the creative processes of photography and their inscription over time, Michel Poivert highlights “ the fluctuation of photography values “. For him,
these are the moments and places, the discourses and tastes which, by assigning different values to photography (objectivity versus lie, vernacular versus art, etc.), provoke a historical and aesthetic rhythm (p. 185).
Through the plasticity of his reflections, the historian-pedagogue demonstrates through his dialogue with the present of contemporary creation that we have not finished dealing with the heritage of XIXe century, which is our matrix.