La contre-culture dans la photographie contemporaine (Editions Textuel)

This book reveals the vitality of a new part of contemporary photographic creation. For a generation, many photographers have been nourishing original practices, concerned with ethics and ecology. Far from embodying marginal experiences, these alternatives form a powerful groundswell. Some artists value ancient processes, a slow temporality and forms of co-creation. Many appropriate vernacular archives by hybridizing photography with manual arts such as collage or embroidery. Others amplify photography through installations.

Activism and poetry combine to offer worlds allowing materiality, gesture, reconciliation and resilience: it is in the body of photography that artists seek to re-read the world and invent new ones, by utopias where the imagination allows us to overcome the cult of images. By reconnecting to the tangible, photography enters a period of transition.

Michel Poivert is professor of art history at the University Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne where he founded the chair of History of Photography. As a photography historian, he has published Les Peintres photographes (Mazenod, 2017), Brève histoire de la photographie, essai (Hazan, 2015), La Photographie contemporaine (Flammarion, 2010) and 50 ans de photographie française de 1970 à nos jours (Textuel, 2019). Michel Poivert is also a critic, exhibition curator and president of the Association de préfiguration du Collège international de photographie du Grand Paris (CIPGP).

This meeting will be moderated by Philippe Guionie, teacher and director of the 1+2 Residence in Toulouse.

For those who wish, the Atelier Gens d’images will be followed by a glass of friendship.

Free access within the limits of available places.