Monique Jacot 1934-2024 & the exhibition La figura e i suoi doppi / La figure et ses doubles/ The figure and it’s doubles at Palazzetto Bru Zane, Venice
We learn of the passing of Monique Jacot on Aug. 6, a few days before her 90th birthday.
Born in Western (French-speaking) Switzerland in 1934, she received photographic training at l’Ecole des Arts et Métiers de Vevey (today Centre d’enseignement professionnel – CEPV) where Gertrude Fehr (1895-1996), among others, taught. Fehr stood for a solid education with an emphasis on photographic technique, lighting and composition. To her fellow students (including her lifelong friend Jean-Loup Sieff), Jacot stood out by striving for greater expressive freedom during her training.
Today one sometimes tends to forget it, but the world was then “obviously” masculine. She succeeded in crossing this unspoken boundary shortly after graduating in 1956 and taking her place as a photojournalist. At the same time, she also broke through a language barrier, for she not only worked for the French-speaking press but also gained recognition in German-speaking circles. She produces reports for l’Illustré, Schweizer Illustrierte, Die Woche and is also published in international publications such as Camera, Elle, Geo, Stern, Time, The Times & Vogue.
Commitment
Monique Jacot’s stood for a broad humanistic view of the world. All her life she travelled tirelessly to North America, Asia and Africa, starting in 1959 on assignment for the World Health Organization.
In the 1980s, she focused her work on the feminine condition in Switzerland, which resulted in a series of publications beginning in 1989. Femmes de la terre opened the series, followed by Printemps de femmes in 1994 and concluded with Cadences : l’usine au féminin (1999)
Artistic research and experimentation
Jacot was always searching for the expressive possibilities of photography. In the 1970s she was introduced to the Polaroid, and in the 1980s and 1990s she increasingly experimented with heliograms, among other things – where she explored the limits of photogram and heliogravure. Some of these works were published in 2002 in the book À jour. These efforts were awarded with the Grand Prix Suisse of Design in 2020.
In 2022, Photo Élysée initiated the exhibition Monique Jacot: La figure et ses doubles, Lausanne, Switzerland. This exhibition is today rightly presented at the wonderful Palazzetto Bru Zane City Palace, Venice, Italy and will still be seen till September 14th.2024 – it shows a selection of works with an emphasis on women and experimentation with a sense of poetry, humour and every day surrealism.
When you look at her work, you are impressed by the power and broad spectrum of her oeuvre. The quality of her work is diametrically opposed to her reputation outside Switzerland. Is it due to the lack of effort made to give prominence to artists from the country of origin, to the over-protection of images, to the complacency of the international cultural field towards the unknown, to discrimination of small cultural communities… I don’t have the answer.
But what I do know : is that with her wide-ranging oeuvre, which includes humanist photojournalism, travel photography and her works with more experimental creative expression, she is now rightly considered one of Switzerland’s most important photographers, who certainly deserves greater international attention.
John Devos
Johndevos.photo (a) gmail.com
Definitely visit :
La figura e i suoi doppi / La figure et ses doubles/ The figure and it’s doubles, Palazzetto Bru Zane, Venice, Italy still until 14.09.2024.
