My earliest memory of Agathe dates to my earliest trip to Paris, around 1971…..I called on her to see if she wanted to make a carte postale from one of my photographs. Imagine how my breath was taken away by the tall blond beauty who smiled at me from the door and invited me into her elegant apartment on the Isle Saint Louis…..immediately she selected a card and invited me for dinner some days later. When I returned she was with her husband Jean-Philippe Charbonnier, a great photojournalist in the true French tradition. We all became instant friends, meeting every time I came to France..so often in those days….
Then one day they told me she wanted to open the first photography gallery in Paris and offered me the inaugural exhibition! I immediately accepted and we agreed to show The Somnambulist and Deja Vu…….
The opening of Galerie Agathe Gaillard on 3 rue du Pont Louis Philippe was an enormous event. Le tout Paris came and kept coming and the party went on well into the night. Cases and cases and cases of champagne were poured. It was without doubt the biggest celebration ever. Agathe had at that moment become the muse of French art photography. And she has held that position ever since that first day.
Now, around 30 years later, she has decided to close her doors. I can fully understand her desire to do this…photography is changing so fast and so much and her contribution was so large to the evolution of the medium . Now let us see who will come and do the same thing as the medium leaps into an unknown future….a future where the image will be forced to find it’s meaning and content in other ways.
Photography has always resisted any single form of definition. Agathe helped define photography as art…….that was not easy to do in the early 70s…..I will forever be grateful to her for this and photographers all over the world share this love .
Ralph Gibson, Bali
May 8, 2013
