For the first time, Usimages presents the industrial photographs of Jean-Pierre Sudre. Between 1956 and 1967, he produced both reportagess for the magazine Réalités and for large companies such as Saint-Gobain or EDF for whom he followed the construction of the Saclay laboratories and the implementation of the first synchrotron.
Plunging into Jean-Pierre Sudre’s contact sheets, we go back in time and discover a photographer who not only worked on his assignments but used the company as a playground where he experimented, with his points of view and his framing, a language of industrial form as a mode of expression. The pipes, test tubes or ducts, recall a tension of the material that is to be found in his pictures of nature, which he preferred to call “Still Life”.
The industrial photographs of Jean-Pierre Sudre are an ode to modernity and technical progress that heralds the period of the GloriousThirty . The development of fossil energy, refining and chemistry will allow the expansion of the automobile and its rationalized production line. By working for subcontractors in the automotive industry such as Languepin, he enters large companies to photograph machines, but his attention goes beyond the object, to take a look at the workers of these companies, constituting a sociological documentation still unknown.
After high school, Jean-Pierre Sudre (1921-1997) trained as a filmmaker at the Nice Film School and then at IDHEC in Paris. He decided in 1949 to become a professional photographer specializing in industrial photography. For more than 10 years, he worked regularly for large companies for which he made photographic albums and many brochures. He stopped working on assignments in the 70s, to devote himself to the experimentation of the photographic medium and teaching.
Jean-Pierre Sudre
The photographer and the industry 1956 – 1966
in partnership with the Musée Nicéphore-Niépce of Chalon-sur-Saône
Usimages, a photographic journey through our territory
From Saturday, April 27 to Saturday, June 15, 2019
Cramoisy, Creil, Montataire, Nogent-sur-Oise, Rousseloy, Saint-Leu-d’Esserent, Saint-Maximin and Villers-Saint-Paul townships
