The Eye of Photography brings you a selection of iconic covers and archival photographic material from the magazine L’Insensé dating from the mid-2000s. The selection covers three remarkable issues.
L’Insensé: Special issue Spain (2003)
Following decades of thwarted creativity, Spain unleashed an unabashedly productive and appealing new wave: the Movida. Years had passed, ideas flowed back and forth, and the heart of Spain now beats to a whole new rhythm. The collective spirit found its expression in the works of staging and painting, in metaphors and paradoxes. All these artists went beyond traditional photographic practice in order to find a better catalyst for personal reflection, to provoke, astonish, and elicit reaction. Through a choice of contemporary photographs and through interviews with Spanish celebrities (Barcelo, Bofill, Semprun), L’Insensé explored this unusual, fiery, caliente, quirky, and surreal movement. Between spirited humor and good spirits, fiction and reality, modesty and extravagance, between land and sea, Spain won us over in style!
L’Insensé: The French touch (2005)
Always looking abroad, seeking to escape beyond one’s own borders in search of exoticism and novelty, one risks forgetting that, right now, here in France, there are some exhilarating photographic trends! L’Insensé thus invited fifty artists representing works made after 2000 — which defined the magazine’s golden rule: giving priority to the contemporaries!
What is striking in this French selection is that every photograph offers a thoughtful idea of the world today and attempts to render visible what escapes our vision. Nothing is merely captured in the moment: everything is thought-out, interpreted, acted out, or outsmarted. Nothing is left to chance. Reality becomes a fiction more real than nature. In the early 2000s, the artistic scene became these photographers’ field of existence, and we see them more on the walls of galleries than on the pages of magazines.
L’Insensé: Special U.S. issue (2006)
Is there a connection, a common thread, between the hand in a city by Saul Leiter, the abandoned house in a field by Danny Lyon, Hillary Clinton working in her car, captured by Annie Leibovitz, two languid lovers by Elinor Carucci, and a portrait by Alec Soth? All the images in this issue were taken in America by American photographers. The effect of setting these photographs side by side reinforces the vision of America that looks deep within itself, ever questioning its roots and its history. For this issue, L’Insensé invited Nathalie Boulouch, a historian of photography, to discuss the dominance of the “American color.” The colors of America, and hence, the colors of reality, the expression of a culture that managed to conquer European hearts through its intense love of the present and of its own modernity, through its excesses and its outbursts.
