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The cultural reconstruction of post-war France was dominated by an ideology of humanism that marked both philosophical discussion and photographic practice. While the humanist consensus concealed philosophical divergences between conservative and progressive visions of society, photography found itself split between its dual possibilities of recording the real and expressing a subjective vision. If Malraux enlisted photography as the means to assimilate other cultures to his imaginary museum, Sartre praised the capacity of the photograph to convey the independence of others. Stanley Donen's Paris-set musical Funny Face (1956) articulates these concerns in the dilemma faced by its librarian-turned-fashion-model protagonist, who is torn between the competing claims of photography and philosophy. Paradoxically, these post-war debates suggest that the instrumental use of photography in the service of ostensible humanism denies the difference of others, while the medium's anti-human or mechanical attachment to the real guarantees an openness to and respect for alterity.

This article examines the politics of interwar colonial identification practices put into place by the French colonial state in order to curtail the mobility of colonial (im)migrants. I argue that photography was used as a tool of imperial control in both French West Africa (AOF) and metropolitan France, since colonial men's inability to provide the required photographic portraits often prevented them from moving around the empire. In response, colonial subjects appropriated photography in alternative ways to subvert these administrative restrictions. Moreover, they took advantage of metropolitan racial stereotypes to contest Western identification practices.

In May 1961, an anonymous French photojournalist took a picture for Agence France Presse depicting a group of pro-independence fighters released from an internment camp near Sétif in Algeria. In the image, several of these men look back to the camera holding framed portraits of the French president, Charles De Gaulle. In the following analysis, I explore how this photograph dramatizes a deeply ambiguous historical moment. In May 1961, the Algerian War was in the balance. On the one hand, De Gaulle was beginning negotiations with pro-independence leaders in an attempt to end the war. On the other, the dissident paramilitary wing of the French army – L'Organisation de l'armée secrète - had recently launched operations in Algeria and mainland France aimed at undermining De Gaulle's overtures for peace and preserving l'Algérie française at any cost. As a result, this photograph dramatizes the visual rhetoric of the official presidential portrait at a moment in which the person of the president and the system of imperial governance he embodied were most under threat. In this photograph, both the meaning of De Gaulle and French imperial power are in suspension. Building on visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff's formulations of "visuality" and "countervisuality," I explore how this photograph recontextualizes the visual rhetoric of the presidential portrait. By returning the presidential gaze back to the camera and the viewer, I argue, this photograph simultaneously reaffirms and destabilizes the semiotics of state power, offering competing visions of an Algerian future. I conclude by exploring how, even as this image renders state power ambiguous, it also records a particular moment of performed solidarity that challenges political sovereignty (either French or Algerian) outright - an instance of what Mirzoeff calls "the right to look."

The late nineteenth century saw a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and British empires. It was also the period in which the camera began to be widely available. Colonial authorities were quick to recognise the power of this new technology, which they used to humiliate defeated opponents and to project an image of supremacy across the world.Drawing on a wealth of visual materials, from soldiers' personal albums to the collections of press agencies and government archives, this book offers a new account of how conflict photography developed in the decades leading up to the First World War. It explores the various ways in which the camera was used to impose order on subject populations in Africa and Asia and to generate propaganda for the public in Europe, where a visual economy of violence was rapidly taking shape. At the same time, it reveals how photographs could escape the intentions of their creators, offering a means for colonial subjects to push back against oppression. --

Throughout this book, the concept of framing is used to look at art, photography, scientific drawings and cinema as visually constituted, spatially bounded productions. The way these genres relate to that which exists beyond the frame, by means of plastic, chemically transposed, pencil-sketched or moving images allows us to decipher the particular language of the visual and at the same time circumscribe the dialectic between presence and absence that is proper to all visual media. Yet, these kinds of re-framing owe their existence to the ruptures and upheavals that marked the demise of certain discursive systems in the past, announcing the emergence of others that were in turn overturned.

This article provides a historical overview of the cultural institutionalization of photography in France, with a particular focus on the pioneering initiatives of individual photography enthusiasts throughout the 1970s to promote photographic culture. These efforts were roughly simultaneous with changes in acquisition and exhibition practices on the part of fine art museums and collections with respect to photography, in response to an increasing world-wide recognition of its status as an art form. The article explains how, despite the promotion of photography as a French invention and a contribution to culture (as early as its inception in 1839), an active cultural politics of photography did not emerge until the early to mid-1980s and was an opportune reaction to, and institutionalized framing of, ground-level cultural developments already underway.

In 1967, Paris hosted a grand Exposition Universelle. Exhibited in this fanfare were goods from all over the world, technological marvels, and France's best artists. The Exposition was a chance for France to prove its cultural hegemony. For, at that moment, it was struggling to prove its status as a global power. Napoleon III had conquered Mexico in 1864, establishing the Austrian Archduke Maximilian as the country's Emperor. Maximilian was essentially a puppet of the French empire, however, and his disposability quickly became clear as the European occupation weakened at the hands of the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez. Napoleon III, realizing the vulnerability of his troops, withdrew and abandoned Maximilian. At the Exposition's prize giving ceremony, Napoleon III received the news of his empire's failure. Juarez had captured Maximilian along with two loyal Mexican military generals, and had publically executed them. As the weeks following the event went by, various accounts and photographs of the execution began to trickle into France's periodicals, feeding the populace's outraged imagination. Manet's Execution of Maximilian attempts to perform many of the same functions as these photographs. The canvas is a curious hybrid of the traditional and the modern. Manet's Execution of Maximilian is essentially a history painting that attempts to carry the journalistic burden of the photograph.

This paper examines the intersection of photography and literature in Le Soliloque de l'empailleur, a short story by Adrien Goetz which reproduces 12 images from photographer Karen Knorr's Fables. After discussing the profoundly intertextual nature of Knorr's photos, which are inspired by Aesop, La Fontaine and Ovid, I undertake a close reading of Goetz's story, examining the shared themes concerning the art of taxidermy and the disjunction between nature and culture present in both works. I also examine the ways in which the text evokes Knorr's Fables, as the narrator sometimes describes a specific photo and at other times encourages the reader to imagine a photo that is not reproduced. The shared thematic content between Goetz's story and Knorr's photos, and the intermedial interaction between text and image allow the reader to concretise the fictional universe of the museum of taxidermied animals envisaged by both partners in this photo-literary collaboration.