C’est de voir qu’il s’agit, or, seeing is what it’s about; already, the sentence is beautiful. It is the title of the Robert Delpire book that editor Vera Michalski is publishing this week at Editions Delpire. Robert Delpire: a mythic character in the photography world over the past sixty years, artistic director, editor, discoverer, friend, and confidant. His captured butterflies? Some incredible names: Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Joseph Koudelka, Sarah Moon (his wife)… There is a mind-blowing journey, a rarely equaled contribution, and an untouched passion which we happily discover throughout this book. We will be leafing through it until vacation and will show you the most revealing and touching pages from the publication.
The texts gathered here were written by Robert Delpire himself over the years for works that he published. The team at Editions Delpire added some articles and excerpts from interviews. Introductions, forwards, prefaces, notes, conversation fragments: these texts concern his work as a “sharer of images” (editor, gallerist, exhibition organizer, advertiser…) as well as his relationship to photography. It also concerns photographers whose work he edited and exhibited.
Michel Christolhomme, humanitarian specialist of social photography and friend of Delpire, writes: “We cannot claim to be exhaustive. Actually, there are many other scattered texts, signed or not, which more directly concern his professional and personal relationships with the photographers. Researching them and gathering them would be a major task for photography and photo-book history.
If he is a sharer of images, Robert Delpire is also a great connoisseur of literature. All throughout his life as an editor, he called on very different writers such as Barthes, Yves Bonnefoy, Breton, Cortázar, Jean Daniel, Duhamel, Gascar, Kerouac, Lacouture, Maspero, Miller, Montherlant, Erik Orsenna, Claude Roy, Danièle Sallenave, Sartre… We could list close to a half-thousand texts whose collection would constitute a fundamental documentary base. Though the images accompanying the gathered texts are so diverse, they only partially cover his tastes and interests. It is along with the entirety of the books he published that one can see his true scope. The title of this book, C’est de voir qu’il s’agit… (Seeing is what it’s about…), was borrowed from the foreword that Robert Delpire wrote in 1989 for L’Histoire de voir, published in the Photo Poche collection.”
Jean-Jacques Naudet
C’est de voir qu’il s’agit…
Published by Editions Delpire
35€
http://www.libella.fr/
