For the 20th anniversary of the Lyon photography center Le Bleu du Ciel, Gilles Verneret, its director, revisits with a book, the photographers he had exhibited. This book highlights all the creativity, the plurality of this new documentary photography through the works of nearly 100 many of them French photographers, but also from all over the world.
In addition to the historical texts by Gilles Verneret and Michel Poivert, this book also hosts the texts written by the photographers presented.
Its title: La Région Humaine.
It is released today in bookstores.
Excerpt from the text “La Photographie Juste / Notes from the Twenty Years of Bleu du Ciel” by Michel Poivert:
Celebrating the 20 years of Bleu du Ciel is indeed an opportunity to pose the question of contemporary photography in social terms, I mean that contemporary social photography – whether we call it documentary or realistic, committed or critical or else still “shared” in a collaborative approach – was confronted with a problem of conscience: how to be contemporary art and critical testimony? How can we not get trapped in what we call the “civilizational surplus” and be fully involved in society? How to respond to the great challenge of the meaning to be given to one’s action? Should we make the experience of photographic forms a political question? Are a legacy of the humanist photo tinged with the politics of the 1930s and a rich engagement of social science thoughts from the 1970s compatible? In short, how can one keep on this thread which ensures that a photographic work does not fall into the globalized economy of images … Le Bleu du Ciel, in view of its programming, has succeeded in this feat of achieving these sometimes contradictory requirements.
Michel Poivert
LA RÉGION HUMAINE
20 YEARS OF DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY
Texts by Michel Poivert and Gilles Verneret
LOCO editions
Public price: 35 euros
in bookstores on March 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-2-843140-35-8
24 x 28 cm, 256 pages, around 200 four-color reproductions.
binding: paperback with flaps.
