Photography Exhibition New releases in the collection « Photo Poche » at Actes Sud

Women photographers

Photo Poches n°160, 161 et 162. Preamble, introductions and biographies by Clara Bouveresse, Iconographic selection by Sarah Moon. Released in October 2020. Format : 12,5 x 19 / 3 volumes 144 pages each / 39 euros

Created in 1982 by publisher Robert Delpire, the “Photo Poche” collection has one hundred and fifty-nine titles today. If a hundred are devoted to men, only a dozen concern women, not by deliberate choice but by lack of recognition granted to women photographers by institutions and the photography market. The “big names” who emerge from exhibitions and publications are, for the most part, male. However, from the first hour, women photographers exist and they are numerous! Aware of these disparities, Robert Delpire wished to devote to them a three-volume box set covering the entire history of photography. Authors from all over the world are gathered here. This building block in the history of women photographers is a contribution and not an inventory that claims to be exhaustive. It is an invitation to discover more and more. The choice of images finally testifies to the subjective tastes of Sarah Moon and Clara Bouveresse: these photographs astonished, marked, moved them … Hopefully they will touch and arouse the curiosity of readers keen on photography.

Gustave le Gray

Photo Poche n°163. Introduction by Catherine Riboud. Released in October 2020. Format : 12,5 x 19 / 144 pages / 13 euros

A few years younger than Nicéphore Niepce and Louis Daguerre, Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) could have been only one of the many discoverers of photography and remained in the history of the medium as a gifted chemist who improved the processes of his elders. He developed the negative on dry waxed paper and the negative on collodion glass – discoveries that undoubtedly enabled him to make the most beautiful prints of his time. But if Gustave Le Gray holds such a place in the history of photography today, it is because he was the first to understand that it was not a simple process of reproduction but an art. full-fledged: “I wish that photography, instead of falling into the domain of industry and commerce, comes within that of art. This is its only, its real place ”.

Leon Levinstein

Photo Poche n°164. Introduction by Bob Shamis. Released in October 2020. Format : 12,5 x 19 / 144 pages / 13 euros

Leon Levinstein embodies in more than one line the mutation of American documentary photography of the 1950s and 1960s. Under the influence of Europeans Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Kertész, a new generation of photographers abandons the role of social denunciation of ‘a Lewis Hine or the Photo League and the government propaganda work of the Farm Security Administration of the 1930s. They assert a more subjective view of the choice of subjects and style, and thus express a personal representation of the world.

This is where Leon Levinstein offers a vision that blends document, form and emotion in an unprecedented way.

Robert Capa

Photo Poche n°36 (New edition). Introduction by Jean Lacouture. Released in October 2020. Format : 12,5 x 19 / 144 pages / 13 euros

He is internationally recognized as the greatest war photographer. His images of the Civil War in Spain and the Allied landings in Normandy are famous. Corresponding to the major illustrated newspapers, he followed all the con icts in China, Israel and Indochina, where he tragically died in 1954.

Through their emotional charge, his images go beyond historical truth and pave the way for contemporary photojournalism.

Ernst Haas

Photo Poche n°127 (Re-print). Introduction by Virginie Chardin. Released in October 2020. Format : 12,5 x 19 / 144 pages / 13 euros

Revealed by a poignant report on post-war Vienna and the return of the last Austrian prisoners, Ernst Haas (1921-1986) was one of the first photographers co-opted by the founders of the Magnum agency in 1950. Pioneer of the color photography, he emigrated to the United States and became Life’s flagship photographer. His formal research and influence make him one of the best colourists in the history of photography.

Bill Brandt

Photo Poche n°60 (Re-print). Introduction by Ian Jeffrey. Released in October 2020. Format : 12,5 x 19 / 144 pages / 13 euros

In the very diversity of subjects that Bill Brandt has treated with predilection, if one had to look for a constant, the essential component of a style that made him one of the very special photographers of the century, it would be shadow. That of the badly paved alleys, that of the London Underground platforms during the alerts. The shadow into which these women are plunged, more lost than undressed in their sad furnished apartments or on the pebble beaches of Sussex. A work in which unreality sweeps away all description.

Martine Franck 

Photo Poche n°111 (Re-print). Introduction by Annick Cojean. Released in October 2020. Format : 12,5 x 19 / 144 pages / 13 euros

Whether she photographs a Nobel Prize or stares at the sometimes-clownish outbursts at the Théâtre du Soleil, her images have the same qualities of finesse of observation, of capturing movement in its tracks. She learned to read the news, she visited the Dalai Lama, Giacometti and Balthus. She made of them striking portraits of delicate intensity. She has led her career from which nothing will distract her, not even the creation of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation which she initiated, which has become one of the high places of photographic culture in Europe.

Saul Leiter

Photo Poche n°113 (Re-print). Introduction by Max Kozloff. Released in October 2020. Format : 12,5 x 19 / 144 pages / 13 euros

Born in Pittsburgh, he quickly abandoned his studies to move to New York at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s. He met Rothko and the abstract expressionists, Faurer and Smith, and discovered street photography. He imposes his mastery of color in unconventional city views in which reflections, transparencies, the complexity of the framing, the mirror effects combine with a very particular technique of emulsions to write a unique form of urban pastoral.

More details on: https://www.actes-sud.fr/