An exhibition at the Centre International du Photojournalisme and at the Mémorial du Camp de Rivesaltes in Perpignan reflects on this dark chapter of French history through the photographs of the major photographers who covered it. The Eye of Photography is letting Jean-François Camp, one of the exhibition’s organizers, take the floor.
The Centre International du Photojournalisme (CIP) in Perpignan has a triple mission: perpetuate the spirit and engagement of the Visa pour l’image festival created in 1989 by Jean-François Leroy, take in all iconographic collections of interested photojournalists, and offer training curricula in information and press. To this day, no public institution offers the conservation of these types of photographic archives, considered to be journalistic documentation, even journalistic illustration. Based on such collections of historic character, many pedagogical actions will be carried out in order to encourage learning about the photography referred to as press and media.
The CIP’s goal is also to pick up projected subjects during the festival’s evenings in order to present them as exhibitions, with prior consent of the photographers. But other exhibitions will also be organized with a more historic aim to give testimony to a major event, like most recently on the Algerian War.
For this occasion, the CIP is joining forces with the Couvent des Minimes, which has hosted the Visa pour l’image festival for thirty years, but was at first a convent and then a military garrison location. The other partner site is the Mémorial du Camp de Rivesaltes, newly renovated, which, from now on, is home to the museum of deportation. Formerly a detention center for the leaders of the National Liberation Front during the Algerian War, it was an encampment for the many Harkis fleeing their country following the Evian Agreements.
With Agnès Sajaloli and Francoise Roux, the directors of the Mémorial du Camp de Rivesaltes, we thought of this exhibition on the Algerian War, which seems very special in this region deeply affected by these events and haven to many immigrants. In order to avoid all bias, we asked Jean-Jacques Jordi, reference historian, to guide us in the maze of all these events.
We also accompanied three major figures of photojournalism – Raymond Depardon, Marc Ribaud, and Pierre Boulat – as well as a skilled amateur, Jacques Horst, who, at the time, was a military doctor in Algeria. During his travels, he experimented with the first Kodachrome II film, which has preserved a remarkable quality of color and sensibility.
At the Couvent des Minimes, we are exhibiting five chapters, from 1958 to 1962, dealing with the evolution of this conflict, the position of General de Gaulle, prints of nationals returning to the continent. Then there were the successive waves of arriving Harkis crammed into the infamous camps of Rivesaltes, the second part of this exhibition from 1962 to 1964 presented in situ.
In this presentation of an “unnamed war”, we deliberately chose not to deal with military operations, but concentrated on political and social plans. The eyes of our major photographers guide us through this historic path and, with emotion and conscious, reveal to us the complete absurdity of conflicts and the devastating consequences of these human tragedies.
Jean-François Camp
Jean-François Camp is the director of Central Dupon’s laboratory of photographic development.
Unnamed War, Algeria 1954-1962
Le Centre International du Photojournalisme
24 Rue François Rabelais
66000 Perpignan
France
http://photo-journalisme.org/fr/centre-international-photojournalisme-home/
