These days, each World Press Photo announcement, each Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan, each publication of a photo is hauled up for judgement in front of the ‘retouching’ courts. Cries of “Fake!” and “Manipulation!” are heard on all sides in the name of the supposed purity of photography that we’re expected to believe is an absolute representation of reality.
In collecting over a hundred photos over three years from the archives of US dailies – The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Boston Herald, The Denver Post, The Detroit News – Raynal Pellicer puts the debate back into context. At a time when the written press is disposing of its archives, he shows how this debate over the ‘truth’ of representation misses a far more important question. We all say, out of habit, that we have ‘seen somebody’s picture in the paper’. In fact, what we’re actually looking at is the printed reproduction of a photographic document. And yet, to get to this point, many stages have to be gone through: technical adjustments to contrast, dithering, adapting images to the available space and so on. Sure, there’s more flexibility now in the past, though there are plenty of contemporary examples of dailies which process images no better than the examples that appear in this exhibition and book covering the period from 1910 to 1970.
Read the full article by Christian Caujolle. in the French version of Le Journal
EXHIBITION
À Fonds Perdus
Collection Raynal Pellicer
From Monday 1st July to Sunday 22 September 2013
Parc des Ateliers
Atelier des Forges
13200 Arles
10 am – 7.30 pm
8 €
BOOK
Version Originale – La Photographie De Presse Retouchée
Raynal Pellicer
Editions de La Martiniere
240 x 285 mm – 232 pages
ISBN : 2732454214
42 €
