Robert Doisneau seems the archetypal French
humanistic photographer, and his public reputation
has soared since the 1980s with massive publications
of his images in albums, books, postcards, and
calendars. HisBaiser de l’hoˆtel de villehas become
a popular icon, very comparable to the fame of
American painter Edward Hopper’sNighthawks.
Most of these photographers learned photography
as a trade, and they kept practicing it, for a living, as
craftsmen. With the complete absence of any photo-
graphic market for prints in France until the 1970s,
their major medium and source of income was the
printed page. They worked for the most part with
the expanding illustrated press (Miroir du monde,
Marianne, Voila,De ́tective, Paris-Match, Vuand Regards) without forgetting the professional press (industry and medicine), and they published their images in the growing number of illustrated books—travel, arts, and even fashion, advertising and the cinema. A few important ‘‘livres d’auteur’’ were published, such as Brassaı ̈’s 1933Paris de nuit; or Izis’s 1950Paris des reˆves; Instantane ́s de Parisby Doisneau of 1955, and Cartier-Bresson’s famous Images ala sauvetteof 1952, which combined pho-
tographs and texts by famous writers, and some-
times illustrated literary works.
A particular place should be made for Henri
Cartier-Bresson, not only the most famous and
influential French photographer of the second half
of the century, but also as the perfect representative
of the French touch, orqualite ́a`la franc ̧aise. Car-
tier-Bresson began as a modernist formalist (as evi-
denced in his pre-war images, see Galassi) and
developed, after the war, a more humanistic philo-
sophy of the person that he celebrated in his famous
‘‘geometrical eye,’’ placing on a same line the ‘‘sub-
ject’’ and the ‘‘heart of the photographer.’’ His
exceptional body of work should be seen in the
context of several others, in between such photo-
graphers as Robert Capa and Chim (David Sey-
mour), Kerte ́sz and Willy Ronis, as well as his
youngeralter ego, Marc Riboud (1923–). Blending
geometry and morals, a theory that he justified with
references to both French seventeenth-century clas-
sicism and Eastern philosophy, Cartier-Bresson
formulated photography as an ethic and an aes-
thetic based on ‘‘the decisive moment,’’ a manner
of visual climax or epiphany only existing in fram-
ing, when the world suddenly makes senseand
reveals itself.
Cartier-Bresson was also the co-founder of Mag-
num Photos, which had a great influence on the emer-
gence of a practice of photo-reportage, both concerned
with and highly conscious of form, which combined
sensitivity to events with personal expression.
For a while indeed, Paris was the capital of photo-
graphic agencies (Gamma, Sigma, Sipa) created in
thewakeofthemovementofMay1968(GuyLe
Querrec, Gilles Caron, Martine Frank, Herve ́Gloa-
guen, Claude-Raymond Dityvon). Raymond Depar-
don, who is also a documentary filmmaker, is a case
in point and a survivor in a world which has des-
troyed much of the ‘‘concerned photography,’’ com-
bining assignment with personal expression, and an
investigating and tender look at human situations
with powerful and yet simple visual forms. Paradoxi-
cally, one could place in the same category Jean-
Loup Sieff, Jean-Franc ̧ois Bauret, and Guy Bourdin,
whose pioneering work in fashion photography in
the 1970s provides examples of freedom of creation
within a highly constrained field; their imaginative
iconography (Bourdin’s fantasies and Sieff’s ultra-
wide-angle shots and black-and-white landscapes)
has now become common place.
Despite the magnitude of Cartier-Bresson as
an influence, most French photography between
the 1950s and the 1980s was of a different kind,
indirectly claiming an American lineage, and
marking its dependence on American inspira-
tion. The ‘‘naturalists’’ such as Denis Brihat,
Lucien Clergue, Jean-Paul Gautrand, and Jean-
Pierre Sudre (Nori 99) took natural forms as
their source of poetic inspiration and treated
photographs as objects like paintings in a man-
ner not unlike Edward Weston’s. They were
also active in fostering an institutional recogni-
tion of photography. The ‘‘subjective realists’’
could be seen as the heirs of the Swiss-born Amer-
ican Robert Frank, whose seminal bookThe Amer-
icans was first published in France, combining
wandering and the practice of the narrative explora-
tion of the series. Bernard Plossu is the para-
digmatic example of this widely present trend, as
well as Arnaud Claass, who teaches at the Ecole
nationale de la Photographie in Arles. An impor-
tant figure of the period is the critic and exhibition
curator (and sometimes photographer) Gilles Mora
(1945–). Typically combining a background in
French literature (which he teaches) and a fascina-
tion for American culture of the 50s and 60s (lit-
erary and musical), Mora gathered many creative
talents in photography in the late 70s and founded
theCahiers de la photographie. He also curated
exhibitions and edited several books, among
which is a reference monograph on Walker Evans.
Common to many of these players is the concept of
‘‘photographic act,’’ which aimed at defining pho-
tography as index (as opposed to emblem or sign),
rooting it, and its analysis, in the act which pro-
duces it.FRANCE. PHOTOGRAPHY IN