Iconographic Exploitation of Photographs Agency Fonds: the Example of Black Star in the 1960s and the 1970s
Research project for The Nadir Mohamed Postdoctoral Fellowship, Ryerson Image Centre, november 2019 ; "Photographic press agencies are much studied from a news perspective, a specificity they claim and on whichthe history of photojournalism is built for the most part, especially from the second half of the 20th century.Black Star, "a major photographic press agency"3, is one of the flagships in this prestigious American history:and was, in Matt Herron's words, "a major force during those years"4. The presentation of the Black StarCollection kept at the RIC5 underlines both the diversity of the production is highlighted and the commercialaspect of the agency6 (by assigning a special place to the Corporate7). However, these agencies, which areresponsive to multiple news items (news, politics, culture, etc.), i.e. are sensitive to the date of the eventsphotographed, paradoxically adopt a classification of images by theme, including for news, reduced tokeywords."