Photographs submitted

There is something moving in art today. Like old photographs that suddenly come to life.

In presenting the exhibition "Histoires de photographies" (Stories of photographs), which is based on its extensive collection, the Mad had plenty of time to ask itself the right questions. What to show? What to show? What to show? It is worth noting that these are exactly the same questions that haunt, more than ever, the photographers of the Pinterest and Instagram years.

The result of this reflection will not create a battle of Hernani. The rise of ideas is no longer clearly perceived today because we apparently no longer know what ideas are for. To move forward, right?

Let's start by stopping regressing. This is what the extreme formal quality of the photographic works on offer seems to be telling us, despite their diversity but also thanks to their diversity. This uniformity from above shows that art inevitably gains by spawning in the most diverse waters, provided that the same perfectionist quest and the same taste for rarity reign everywhere.

Fashion, architecture, decoration, textiles, publishing, advertising or war... Photography, more than any other art form, has often been invited to play the role of utility and then star in the most prominent and most sinister activities of our societies, which are eager for the instrumentalization of technology. It is up to photography to show all its art in this willingly documentary vision of its vocation.

What stands out in these resolutely plural Histories of Photography? The nature and quality of the links that photography has succeeded in weaving in an era that is poles apart from our own and yet so close to it.  It is enough to shake our materialist vision of abstract painting. It is true that photographers who worked for advertising were not treated as such. We did not vilify as slaves those who put their art at the service of editorial projects, even though they were hyper-directive. Why?

These commercial activities, far from harming them, helped artists to master new technologies and develop new techniques. To the benefit of avant-garde photography. This seems paradoxical to us today. We would see this as an alienation of art.

Photograph a model wearing a T-shirt and jeans. You will be asked where these textiles come from, where they are sold and how they will be recycled. No one will ask you about your artistic intent and technical options. Is this not where art is alienated? Or even worse.

If art is so easy to alienate, isn't it because it has no more territory of its own to which it can escape, fly away from the clutches of fashion, advertising and publishing. A territory that could once again be called, why not, "avant-garde".

Illustration: René Herbst - Boat cabin - 1934