Until April 23, the MuCEM in Marseille hosts the exhibition Roman-Photo, designed by the curators Frédérique Deschamps and Marie-Charlotte Calafat. The exhibition examines the popularity of this format of sentimental literature, and catalogs its editorial and artistic twists and turns, ranging from pornography to humor. Funny, offbeat, and well researched, the exhibition is a marvelous gateway to understanding post-1960 French society.
For the benefit of the younger readers or to refresh our memory, we must sketch a brief history of the photo novel. The MuCEM’s exhibition is much more comprehensive than the captions in a photo novel, and traces the itinerary of this literary and photographic phenomenon. The photo novel saw the light of day in 1947, simultaneously in two different Italian journals: Il Mio Sogno and Bolero Film. That same year, their French counterpart Nous Deux, was created. Two years later, the filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni shot the documentary L’Amorosa Menzogna (Lies of Love) which incorporated a photo novel into its narrative. The vivid interest in the medium only grew over the following years. By 1957, Nous Deux was putting out 1.5 million copies weekly! In France alone, one third of the population was reading photo novels in the 1960s. To this day, the most widely read Francophone magazine, Nous Deux, maintains a circulation of 350,000 copies a week.
The object is intriguing, fascinating, and has become a stepping-stone for popular actors and actresses as well as athletes craving the limelight. In the 1950s and 60s, Carmen Maura, Johnny Halliday, Dalida, Jacques Dutronc, as well as the cyclist Hugo Koblet were featured on the covers of some bestselling photo novels, all cheesy and a delight to pick up again. Sylvie Vatran, Sacha Distel, Frank Alamo, Klaus Kinski… have all put an appearance in the photo novel, bearing witness to the medium’s continued popularity.
Its venerable history, a true catalyst for passions which we would be wrong to classify as working-class, is the subject of the first portion of the exhibition. A nearly thirty-year-long love affair with the photo-novel shows that its readers come from all walks of life. It is as much a sophisticated aesthetic format utilized and explored by filmmakers as an object awaited every week and handled by true experts in passion, such as the creator Hubert Serra who published nearly 800 books.
The exhibition also gives us an understanding of the close connections between the photo novel and the cinema. Take for example the unit still photographer Raymond Cachetier and his simply marvelous photo novel put together using contact sheets from Godard’s Breathless. The erotically charged scenes with Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo become a pretext for a forbidden passion, using all the tricks of the trade (tear-jerking, the idyll of free love, intimacy, and eroticism).
Another dimension of the photo novel’s popularity is global, spanning from Italy, France, to Spain, of course, but also to South America (Argentina and Brazil), Iran, all the way down to South Africa. The photo novel had become so widespread that it was denounced for its corrupting character, on different grounds, by Pope John XXIII and the communists (“the dangers of tabloids” versus “the new opium of the people”). Roland Barthes passed a similarly harsh judgment: “Nous Deux is a magazine more obscene than Sade.” Curiously, the medium found a colder reception in Puritan countries like England or the United States, where there was historically a lot of resistance to the culture of religious, as well as popular, images.
While the first half of the exhibition offers a splendid survey of the historical importance of the photo novel, the second explores editorial and artistic potential of the medium.
Satirical journals like Hara Kiri were among the first to transform the genre. Some of Le Professeur Charon’s simple, moronic illustrations make you roar with laughter. Coluche also lent his body, his acting, and his gags to the scenarios invented by Gébé and Wolinski.
The photo novel also stirs up emotions. The genre proved to be a wonderful tool for horror and pornography. In a feat of editorial prowess, some photo novels combined both. This was true of Satanik, which was censored in 1967. Today, its illustrations are amusing; once they were arousing and a source of pleasure.
In another remarkable appropriation of the genre, Jordi Bover, in his Parfum d’Amnésium, imagined an entire play made of photo novels put together, played, and taken apart on stage by actors. The result, shown in the form of a video, is absolutely astonishing and reveals the full performative potential of an otherwise flat and often linear object.
Lastly, the MuCEM also wanted to recognize the readers and its own region. The photographer Thierry Bouët did a portrait of a dozen Marseille-region subscribers to the journal Nous Deux. From teenage years to old age, they all still read photo novels. “People love to tell their love stories,” the photographer was pleased to realize.
Each portrait is associated with different readings. One old woman, a creature of habit, has always read Nous Deux and remembers how it stirred her first flutters of love. At home, there is no room for eroticism. She continues to read the magazine, as much out of habit as out of loyalty to her youthful emotions. One young woman has played in photo novels for twenty years and has become passionate about the medium. She is both an actor and a reader. These diverse trajectories are immortalized by the photographer with “respectful irony,” without scorn or mockery.
In the spirit of the exhibition, Thierry Boüet shows how the photo novel was able to, and still can, participate in cultural life as much as it does in discreet and comforting brand of eroticism. He shows the diversity of the readership, their attachment to the object, and their eagerness to turn to the next page. His work fits perfectly with the exhibition, which finally offers an understanding of the photo novel, its dreams and its expressiveness.
Arthur Dayras
Arthur Dayras is a writer specializing in photography. He lives and works in Paris.
Roman-Photo
December 13, 2017 to April 23, 2018
Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (MuCEM)
7 Promenade Robert Laffont
13002 Marseille
France
