Selected Group Exhibitions
1925 L’Art d’Aujourd’hui;Syndicat des Anti-Quaires, Paris
1929 Photgraphie der Gegenwar; Museum Folkwang Essen
Film und Foto: Internationale Ausstellung des
Deutschen Werkbunde; Stuttgart, Germany and traveling
1930 Modern European Photography; Julien Levy Gallery,
New York, New York
1937 Foto ‘37; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
1970 Photo Eye of the 20s; Museum of Modern Art, New
York, New York (traveling U.S.A.)
1975 Women of Photography: An Historical Survey; San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Cali-
fornia (traveling, U.S.A., 1975–1977)
1980 Avant-Garde Photography in Germany 1919–1939; San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Cali-
fornia (traveling U.S.A., 1981–1982)
1981 Germany: The New Vision; Fraenkel Gallery, San
Francisco, California
1982 Lichbildnisse: Das Porta ̈it in der Fotografie; Rheinisches
Landesmuseum, Bonn, Germany
Lege et l’Espirit Moderne;Muse ́e d’Art Moderne de
La Ville, Paris, France
1983 Bauhausfotografie; Institut fu ̈r Auslandbeziehung,
Stuttgart, Germany and travelingFurther Reading
Armstrong, Carol. ‘‘Florence Henri, a photographic series
of 1928: Mirror, mirror on the wall.’’History of Photo-
graphy18 (Autumn, 1994): 223–229.
DuPont, Diana C.Florence Henri: Artist-Photographer of
the Avant-Garde. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art, 1990.
Fagiolo, Maurizio.Florence Henri: una riflessione sulla foto-
graphia. Turin: Martano, 1975.
Florence Henri. Milan: Electa, 1995.
Florence Henri. Genoa and New York: Martini & Ronchetti
Gallery, December 1974.FRANC ̧ OIS HERS
Belgian
Franc ̧ois Hers was born in 1943 in Brussels. He is
not a photographer per se but rather an artist who
uses photographs to intervene in the field of art. His
career can be summed up as a search for a new status
for art in contemporary society defined as a new
relationship between artists, their works, and society.
His choice of photography as a medium and his
(relatively limited) personal photographic practice
are the direct product of this intellectual, philosophi-
cal, and political position. His ambition, after his art
studies, was to reclaim the freedom and relevance for
artthathefeltthemodernityofearlytwentieth
century figure Marcel Duchamp had gained and
lost afterwards, and go beyond the figure of the
solitary and all-powerful artist as avant-garde hero.
His search for a new relevance and legitimacy for art
was inscribed in a great utopia of collective involve-
ment of all—and not simply artists—in art as con-
sumer society invaded 1960s Europe.
In 1966, one of Hers’s first projects was to design a
commissioned mural for a company by asking the
workers to take pictures or to borrow prints from
their family albums to tell their life stories. One
hundred of the most representative images chosen
by the workers made up the final mural.
His later practice was that of a photographer using
photographs for larger projects, often institutional
ones, and much less that of an image maker. Indeed
he often states that his participating in group exhibi-
tions is merely for him a way to keep in touch with
the world of art, but that his main concern is to
modify its deep structure and modes of intervention.
In 1972, he co-founded Viva, a cooperative of photo-
grapher-authors modeled after Magnum Photos. The
second half of the 1970s saw him traveling widely and
making various reportages leading in 1981 to a book
and exhibition,Inte ́rieurs, and in 1983 toRe ́cits.
This was followed in 1983 by his initiating one of
the major photographic realizations of the decade in
France, the Mission photographique de la DATAR
(Photographic Mission of the Direction for Territor-
ial Planning). Hers, with the support of the director of
the government agency for planning and develop-
ment, Bernard Latarjet, set up an ambitious program
of public commissions. The Mission, combining the
documentary and accumulative spirit of the Farm
Security Administration and the philosophy of
Hers’s concept of commission, contracted withHERS, FRANC ̧ OIS