Les Douches la Galerie presents its new group exhibition, Jeux de mots, curated by Éric Rémy, who writes:
Following Dans ma cuisine, a group exhibition devoted last year to domestic space and the modest arrangement of everyday objects through the vision of twentieth-century photographers, this new proposal from Les Douches la Galerie extends the same gesture: exploring the relationship between text and photography. This time, it is language itself words, letters, typographic signs that enters the photographic field. Omnipresent in our visual environment, text is considered here not only as a simple accompaniment to the image, but also as an active material, capable of altering its reading, unsettling its obviousness, or enriching its poetic and conceptual scope.
Jeux de mots thus asserts a continuity: that of a photography that questions the most familiar signs, explores their art potential, and reveals, through subtle shifts, the image’s capacity to transform the ordinary into a sensory and critical experience.
Until the 1920s, text and photography maintained a hierarchical, well-ordered relationship: the photography illustrated the text, or the text captioned the image. These two “writings of the world” coexisted for a long time before truly meeting.
The first conscious integrations of typography into photography appeared at the beginning of the 1920s: at the Bauhaus, under the impetus of László Moholy-Nagy; among the Russian Constructivists, notably El Lissitzky; in the works of the Dada movement; and, decisively, with the rise of advertising. In France, the magazine VU, founded in 1928, placed photography at the heart of information for the first time: the image made a sensational entrance into the illustrated press and began to dethrone text.
Throughout the twentieth century, photographers nevertheless worked toward a form of reconciliation. Photography incorporated letters into its composition, played with the meaning of words, illustrated alphabets, and combined narratives with images. Text and photography sought to coexist in a new alliance, in which each found its own necessity.
At the Bauhaus, under Walter Gropius’s direction, the blending of disciplines lay at the heart of teaching. Joost Schmidt, first a painter and later a typographer, after having studied there, taught typographic art and produced delicate compositions in which photography incorporated the letter in the manner of an illuminated initial. The Lithuanian Moï Ver, trained at the Dessau Bauhaus under Kandinsky and Klee, likewise turned to photography and demonstrated, in the exceedingly rare study Adhesol, his art of play between image and typography. Klaus Wittkugel studied in Germany with the painter-typographer-photographer Max Burchartz, and in turn created compositions in which text became a photographic subject, notably in the service of promoting companies and institutions in 1930s Berlin.
In Paris, in 1927, Charles Peignot, director of the Deberny & Peignot type foundry, founded the magazine Arts & Métiers Graphiques, which became the relay and champion of this visual revolution. On March 15, 1930, a special issue was devoted to photography; its success was such that it was decided to publish a volume dedicated to this medium every year. Around Deberny & Peignot, Pierre Boucher, Maurice Tabard, and Roger Parry invented an advertising language based on photomontage, the photogram, and collage, in which text and image were inseparable.
At the request of Éditions Horizons de France, François Kollar produced La France travaille (1931-1934), a vast commission that made him one of the great industrial reporters of his time.
One of the volumes is devoted to the book trades, and through his lens a typographic printing plate becomes a metallic landscape, a city seen from the sky.
The encounter between photography and typography is not limited to books. Posters invaded city walls, illuminated signs saturated urban space. Buildings are covered with slogans, brands, and graphic structures. Berenice Abbott, Pierre Verger, Ernst Haas, and Louis Faurer made them privileged subjects. In a photograph by Sabine Weiss, two workers perched before the immense luminous page of Times Square become, almost despite themselves, typographic signs. This invasion of text also contaminated painting, as in Fernand Léger’s work (Nature morte ABC, 1927).
Later, Stéphane Couturier would revisit this interaction in his series Les Nouveaux Constructeurs. His image ABC does not open an alphabet book, but refers to “À Blaise Cendrars,” the writer and friend of Léger, an ardent defender of advertising, which he described as the “most beautiful expression of his era.”
Raymond Hains, before making the torn poster his material of choice, experimented in the 1950s with hypnagogic photography, distorting reality through ribbed glass. His work is entirely centered on language: words and letters became material, distorted and fragmented, as in Hépérile, Camille Bryen’s poem shattered by the image.
In the same spirit, a few decades later, Henri Foucault in turn seized upon the letters of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal and scattered them into clouds, constellations, recomposed skies.
In the 1950s, Roger Catherineau, an active figure in the Rencontres de Lure, devoted an essential part of his research to “photographism,” and to the interaction between writing and photography. The first photography professor at the École Estienne, he created the first photographic alphabet as well as a series of “printed portraits” superimposing faces and torn newspapers.
At the same time, Anneliese Hager, in the intimacy of her apartment, produced photograms that sometimes incorporated fragments of newspapers. Some were published in the poetry collection Weiße Schatten (Ombres blanches), an oxymoron that summarizes the very mystery of photography: light and shadow, black and white, revealed and concealed.
Although the first photo-novel La Folle d’Itteville (1931), conceived by Germaine Krull and Georges Simenon was a failure, the form found its audience in women’s magazines from the 1950s to the 1970s. Nicole Gravier offered a joyful critique of it in the 1980s, staging herself in stereotyped poses accompanied by ironic texts.
In 1984, Patrick Tosani summoned another writing system, Braille, in a series of blurred portraits projected onto embossed pages. He associated sight and touch, but diverted their functions: Braille became image, stripped of its haptic character, while photography lost its power of identification.
In the 1990s, Sophie Calle’s work attracted attention for its intimate and programmatic narratives, in which photography documented experiences set down in words, giving equal place to text and image. The American Duane Michals, through his handwritten texts inscribed within the image, adds narrative depth to the visual poetry of his photographs.
Writer and photographer Denis Roche had some of his photographs printed with a wide white margin in order to obtain an additional space for expression, allowing him to combine writing and image.
Words are not only those of advertising: they are also those of political protest plastered on walls. In May ’68, Jean-Claude Gautrand roamed the city and recorded the ephemeral slogans that he published in his book Les Murs de mai. From the 1980s onward, Barbara Kruger denounced consumer society by covering her images with monumental typographic injunctions: the text obliterated the image to the point of sometimes making it disappear.
American photographer Tom Arndt bears witness to his civic engagement by in turn photographing leaflets, posters, and political slogans, which he appropriates through the image.
Today, prompts those texts addressed to artificial intelligences to produce images seem to close the loop: text indirectly regains power in a century in which the image had challenged it.
Éric Rémy
With works by Berenice Abbott, Tom Arndt, Pierre Boucher, Sophie Calle, Roger Catherineau, Stéphane Couturier, Joël Ducorroy, Henri Foucault, Jean-Claude Gautrand, Nicole Gravier, Hervé Guibert, Ernst Haas, Anneliese Hager, Raymond Hains, Frank Horvat, Bogdan Konopka, François Kollar, Barbara Kruger, Yvan Le Bozec, Vivian Maier, Ray K. Metzker, Duane Michals, Jean Moral, Marvin E. Newman, Roger Parry, Denis Roche, Man Ray, Joost Schmidt, Maurice Tabard, Patrick Tosani, Moï Ver, Sabine Weiss, and Klaus Wittkugel.
Jeux de mots
from March 13 to May 13, 2026
Les Douches la Galerie
54, rue Chapon
75003 Paris
09 61 48 92 34
www.lesdoucheslagalerie.com
