Sam Stourdzé was happy during his five-year tenure as director of the Musée de l’Elysée. In fact, he says, he never would have left that idyllic setting were it not for the chance to be a part of the legendary Rencontres d’Arles photography festival. The challenge he made for himself was to scale down his museum experience to festival size, “moving outside the museum and into the city,” he says. “I was chosen in the end, but it could have been any one of us. We all know each other. And there were some really great people in the running.”
For this latest adventure, he feels responsible for maintaining the festival’s popularity, which he considers both powerful and fragile, partly because it is only partly institutionalized. “I also want to promote a new approach to photography, which is consistent with a return to the fundamentals. Whether the issue is contemporary practices or more historical approaches, what interests me most is the ability to revisit them all.” The Stephen Shore retrospective planned for next year reflects this idea. “The fact that Stephen Shore is a classic isn’t sufficient. But knowing that he has never been the subject of a retrospective in the United States or Europe, going back to his beginnings at The Factory and accounting for his influence allows us to take a fresh look at his work.”
Stourdzé is worthy of the role. He started out as an independent curator at 25. Fifteen years later, this former resident of the Villa Médicis had already overseen many important exhibitions, including Chaplin et les images and Fellini, La Grande parade at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2006 and 2011, respectively. From 1996 to 2010, he founded and presided over the company NBC Photographie and NBC Editions. He was a board member of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, for which he organized lectures and conferences in 2005 and 2010. He then became a member of the Collège de l’Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation (IRI) at the Centre Pompidou from 2007 to 2009, and a member of the Conseil d’administration de la Société française de Photographie from 2000 to 2012.
