In partnership between the Château d’Eau, Residence 1+2 and ISDAT, meeting-screening moderated by Philippe Guionie, director of Residence 1+2 and Léo Martinez, art historian, on the occasion of the release of Michel Poivert’s new work, “La contre-culture dans la photographie contemporaine”.

By reconnecting to the tangible, photography enters a period of transition. 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. Still others amplify photography through installations.

Activism and poetry combine to propose worlds where it is a question of 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).

Free access within the limits of available places.

The meeting-screening will take place on Friday, April 21, 2023 at 6:15 pm.