Following his discussions with American photographers and the discovery, in the USA, of workshops (educational courses), which he brought to Arles, Lucien Clergue felt the need to validate his creative intuition with academic recognition.
Having had to go to work at a young age to support the needs of his family and pay off his mother’s debts, he left school too early to obtain any kind of diploma.
He went back to the beaches of the Camargue where he carried out his primary research and prepared a thesis for a doctorate in photography, ‘Language of the Sands’, which he defended, notably, in front of Roland Barthes in 1979.
Drawn from the abstract and ephemeral shapes and designs left on the sand, this work, with its exclusively graphic character, appealed to the academics by its structure, to the point of being validated without any kind of supporting text.
François Hébel and Christian Lacroix
EXHIBITION
Lucien Clergue 1934 – 2014
From November 14th, 2015 to February 25th, 2016
Le Grand Palais
avenue Winston Churchill
75008 Paris
France
http://www.grandpalais.fr
