Created in 2007, the NOOR photographic agency, whose name means “light” in Arabic, brings together 14 award-winning and recognized photographers of 11 different nationalities. On the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the agency, all of them generously drew from their archives to donate some sixty prints to the Prints and Photography Department of the BnF.
This set presented in the Donor Gallery shows the excellence of NOOR, an independent structure that has relied on quality reporting based on the demanding work of committed photographers around the world, driven by a true professional ethic.
Created in 2007, the NOOR photographic agency, whose name means “light” in Arabic, brings together 14 award-winning and recognized photographers of 11 different nationalities. On the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the agency, everyone drew on their archives to donate some sixty prints to the Prints and Photography Department of the BnF.
The prints on display cover subjects as varied as the Arab Spring, the conflicts in Iraq or Chechnya, the diamond mines, American society or childhood…
Most of them illustrate the portrait genre, embodying the motto of one of the agency’s founders, Stanley Greene, “some things simply need to be seen”.
Officially launched in September 2007 during the Visa pour l’image festival in Perpignan, at the initiative of Stanley Greene and Kadir van Lohuizen, soon joined by nine other co-founders including Pep Bonet, Yuri Kozyrev and Francesco Zizola, the birth de NOOR intervened in a media context where the codes of photoreportage were being overturned, sometimes putting on an equal footing the simple testimony of an event by an amateur photographer and the more detailed report that a great photoreporter can give. The Challenge was then for its members to bring light to forgotten places or populations from which the media had gradually turned away.
Exhibition :
Curator
Héloïse Conésa, curator in the Department of Prints and Photography, BnF
Ce monde qui nous regarde : 15 ans de l’agence NOOR
April 13 – June 5, 2022
BnF I François-Mitterrand/ Galerie des donateurs
Quai Francois-Mauriac, 75013 Paris
www.bnf.fr
