Among the clubs, thePhoto-club des 30 40
(created in 1951 by Roger Deloy) was particularly
innovative and welcoming to new trends in con-
temporary photography, as was theGroupe Libre
Expression(founded in 1963 by Jean-Claude Gau-
trand, Jean Dieuzaide, Pierre Riehl), which formed
the avant-garde of a renaissance of creation. Of a
somewhat hybrid kind, theGens d’Imagesassocia-
tion, created by Albert Ple ́cy in 1954, includes
photographers, graphic designers, printers and
journalists, and gives out two important awards:
the Nie ́pce Award to a young photographer want-
ing to become a professional, and the Nadar
Award to the best photobook of the year. As for
theSocie ́te ́franc ̧aise de photographie, created in
1851 and owning a rich collection of images, it
spent most of the century as a slumbering belle,
before being revived in the 1990s by a group of
young scholars who now publish the respected
Etudes photographiques, a French equivalent of
History of Photography.
The real new start of French photography took
place in the 1970s with the simultaneous expansion
of exhibitions, teaching, collection, and writing
about photography, while teaching remained mod-
est until the 1980s, and, one could even argue, the
1990s. The American model was very important
(see Kempf) in this change, as young Frenchmen
and aspiring photographers discovered in the Uni-
ted States not only a photographic form but also a
country where photography was taken seriously by
powerful cultural and educational institutions. In
a country that had introduced the cinema in the
university and invented the nouvelle vogue, they
longed for similar recognition. Museums created
and expanded their collections of photography,
thus forming a base for recognition and a market
for prints. The Rencontres Internationales de la
Photographie (RIP), founded in Arles in 1970,
functioned as a series of American-style workshops
for almost a decade before turning into a mini
Cannes festival of photography. Festivals, with
the biennaleMois de la Photo(Month of Photo-
graphy) in Paris (begun in1980), multiplied in the
provinces as well, as did houses of photography
and photography museums (including the Centre
national de la photographie in 1982; Maison eur-
ope ́enne de la photographie following Paris-Audio-
visuel of 1977, created by Jean-Louis Monterosso;
and the Centre photographique du Nord-Pas-de-
Calais founded by Pierre Denain). Many public
and semi-public institutions (DATAR, Fondation
de France) commissioned or supported photogra-
phers and photographic projects, developed collec-
tions, produced exhibitions and books, stimulating
at least the market, and making it possible for
a sizeable number of photographers to earn a liv-
ing outside the press, whose market had shrunk
considerably in the 90s. Contrejour, founded by
Claude Nori (born in 1949) in 1975, as both a
publishing house and a meeting place for contem-
porary photography until its folding in the 1990s,
helped disseminate contemporary French photo-
graphy through various short-lived but influent-
ial publications, exhibitions, and low-cost books.
Interestingly, as photography finally achieved a
broader status, almost all trace of an industry of
photographic equipment and material had disap-
peared, with the acquisition of the Lumie`re com-
pany by Ciba and its successive merging with Ilford
(1961–1976) and narrowing of activity, and that of
the camera and lens makers SOM and OPL (and
their famous Foca). Only Kodak remained in Paris.
Teaching has always remained the poor relation
of photography. Because of a lack of means, uni-
versities have never managed to launch comprehen-
sive Bachelor of Fine Arts/Master of Fine Arts
programs in photography, so common in the post-
war era in the United States. The notable exceptions
of Paris 8 and Paris 1, and the existence of seminars
and workshops in other universities and especially
fine arts schools (where photography is now a fash-
ionable and necessary part of the curriculum)
should not hide the dearth of technical means,
which often limits teaching to theory, a fact that
the recent development of computer graphics and
digital photography has managed to hide. Only two
institutions actually tackled the problem of the spe-
cialized and comprehensive curriculum: the old
lyce ́e Lumie`re, whose orientation is the training of
technicians in photography and the cinema; and the
Ecole Nationale de la Photographie (ENP) in Arles
(1982), which, under the able leadership of its first
director, Alain Desvergnes, became a model school
training ‘‘image people.’’
This theoretical slant is mirrored in the written
production on photography. With the exception of
Pierre Bourdieu and hisUn art moyen, a sociology
of photographic practice, French photographic
writing has been essentially of a theoretical or aes-
thetic nature, and in any case very limited. The
paradigm has been—and to a great extent remains
in contemporary studies—philosophical (more in
fact than semiological, despite a few pieces by
Roland Barthes and lesser-known scholars) and
literary, often mixing the two in the Blanchot tradi-
tion (Denis Roche, Re ́gis Durand, Jean-Marie
Shaeffer). The archetypal work by Barthes,Camera
Lucida, seems a case in point where theoretic-
al concepts solidify in formulas as they coalesceFRANCE, PHOTOGRAPHY IN