of works clustering around photography, thus
including video, digital, and installations as well
as conceptual photography.
Durand has an academic background in the arts
and experience as an art critic. He has published
several books, includingHabiter l’image – essais sur
la photogrpahie 1990–1994 and Le Temps de
l’image – essais sur les conditions d’une histoire des
formes photographiques 1995. Before assuming the
directorship of the CNP, Durand worked under the
Minister of Culture and handled artistic direction
for the Printemps du Cahors, an annual contem-
porary art and photography event in France since
1990 with dozens of international participants and
over 100,000 visitors each year. As director of the
CNP, Durand curated the exhibitionsBiannual of
the Image,Paris 98andChronicles from outside and
other hypothesis, presented at the Recontres inter-
nationales de la Photographie at Arles in the sum-
mer of 2000.
Durand describes his vision for the CNP as fol-
lows:
It seems necessary more than ever that artists have access
to other tools of production and post-production, more
flexible and less burdensome tools. This is the role of art
centers and this is how the CNP functions, in a specific
field of activity, namely that of the contemporary image,
looking at explorations where photography, video, digi-
tal and cinemagraphic works coexist. The CNP accepts
as its mission the challenge of accompanying and exhi-
biting the work of artists exploring image in a vast senseof the word image. Photography is neither art nor non-
art. Approached in certain ways, photography can reveal
information, journalism, documentation. Approached in
other ways, photography desperately seeks to be identi-
fied with other arts. Photography becomes true creation
only when it plays with certain particular photographic
qualities, qualities applied to a specific project, notably
in its aptitude to produce an image transformed and
reflected from the real and at the same time, inventing
new forms. This is why photography persists as a remark-
able tool for creation, inseparable today from the mobile
world of other forms of images.BRUCEMcKaig
Seealso: Atget, Euge`ne; Calle, Sophie; Capa,
Robert; Cartier-Bresson, Henri; Doisneau, Robert;
Erwitt, Elliott; Farm Securities Administration;
Klein, William; Lartigue, Jacques-Henri; Mikhai-
lov, BorisFurther Reading
Le Centre National de la Photographie homepage.www.
cnp-photographie.com/.
Centre National de la Photographie, 1981–1991Vous avez
dit culture?...(1981–1991 Did you say culture?...), Paris:
CNP 1992.
Durand, Regis. Habiter l’image – essais sur la photogrpahie
1990–1994.Paris: Marval, 1994.
Durand, Regis.Le Temps de l’image – essais sur les condi-
tions d’une histoire des formes photographiques 1995.
Larousse/CNRS Editions,Dictionaire des politiques cul-
turelles de la france depuis 1959, Paris: Larousse, 2001.MARTI
́
N CHAMBI
Peruvian
Few Latin American photographers are more
recognized for their technique and artistry than
the Peruvian Martı ́n Chambi. In his work, Peru-
vian society and Inca culture of the first half of the
twentieth century still live. As Euge`ne Atget is to
Paris and its streets, so is Chambi to Cuzco and its
Inca haunts.
Chambi was born in Coaza in 1891 in an
Andean village in southern Peru, near Lake Titi-
caca. Of Indian descent and raised in poverty, as a
boy he joined his father in working for the British
Santo Domingo Mining Company. Young Martı ́n
attached himself to the company’s photographer-
surveyor. Fascinated by the man’s equipment, the
boy bore it for him over the wide and hilly terrain
of the mining company’s interests. At an early age,
therefore, Chambi became familiar with the basic
operations of a camera, its placement, angles, and
views, and the photos that emerged from it after
the magic intermingling in darkness of plates
and chemicals.
Some time in his late teens, around 1908, he went
to live in Arequipa, possibly to pursue secondary
education; but he also became the apprentice of theCHAMBI, MARTI ́N