Pictorialism

By Mélon Marc émmanuel HANNON ÉDOUARD (1853-1931)

Photo hobbyist, born in Ixelles, in the suburbs of Brussels, of a family of the Belgian upper middle classes, Édouard Hannon made studies of engineer at the university of Ghent. The famous firm of chemicals Solvay charged it, in 1877, with founding a branch with Dombasle, in French Lorraine. At the time of this stay, it discovers the workshop of glassmaking and cabinet work that Emile Gallé had just founded in Nancy. Its sensitivity to the Art nouveau engaged it, as of the beginning of the years 1890, to join the rows of the photo hobbyists eager to make recognize photography like an art. It was the beginning of what is called today the school of the pictorialism in photography, a movement born in the mobility of the Art nouveau and which, in the same spirit, sought to make apply to photography, always regarded as an industrial art, criteria of appreciation in force for the fine arts.

This dichotomy whose still photography at the end suffered of the XIXe century, Hannon made the experiment in its photographic practice of it even. As a photo hobbyist, member of the Association Belgian of photography, and thus in favour of the theses pictorialists, Hannon carried out a work which one can describe as “erudite”, because referring to the rules of the composition, framing and contrast. He used the techniques of pulling sophisticated in vogue near the photographers artists (pulling with coal, with dichromate gum) and invented with ingeniousness some processes making it possible to return the effects of screen and blur, so much at the time required. Beside this official work, which was entitled to the ogee mouldings of the living rooms, Hannon carried out as an engineer an important collection of stereotypes taken during its many voyages abroad where the Solvay company sent it to control the installation of its subsidiary companies.

These photographs, which one knows the negative ones but few pullings, are presented in the form of travel souvenirs, traces of the visited places, without apparent concern of the composition nor of framing. But what, in the spirit of Hannon, was not to undoubtedly be that a book of notes seems today a report of an exceptional quality on the social life - mainly urban life of the underprivileged classes - from Europe, the United States and especially of Russia tsarist of the end of the XIXe century. As a testimony, the work of Hannon takes seat at the sides of the great names of documentary photographic, like Lewis Hine or Walker Evans. However, the high informative value of this report should not occult its astonishing formal qualities. Indeed, the stereotypes of Hannon are as unfinished sketches if one compares them with his photographs pictorialists tallied, drawn and exposed with all the care required for a work of art. But with the passing of time, one discovers that these sketches in fact are controlled in a way surprisingly meticulous person and that they are subjected not to a pictorial esthetics, but with a specifically photographic esthetics, based on the off-registration, the out-field and the against-composition. Hannon must have an incredibly premonitory vision of what would be, thirty years later, the movement of the pure photography, exaltée by Strand and Stieglitz in the United States, or by Feininger and Renger-Patzsch in Germany. The work of Édouard Hannon was rediscovery and studied by the Belgian photographer Gilbert De Keyser, then safeguarded and preserved by photographic Space Contretype, center of contemporary photography, installed since 1988 in the old private mansion of the photographer, in Saint-Gilles, Brussels.

This beautiful residence Art nouveau was built in 1903 by a friend of Édouard Hannon, the architect Jules Brunfaut. Photographic Space Contretype devoted several exposures to Hannon, in particular É. Hannon and the new art, in 1993.

hoto hobbyist, born in Ixelles, in the suburbs of Brussels, of a family of the Belgian upper middle classes, Édouard Hannon made studies of engineer at the university of Ghent. The famous firm of chemicals Solvay charged it, in 1877, with founding a branch with Dombasle, in French Lorraine. At the time of this stay, it discovers the workshop of glassmaking and cabinet work that Emile Gallé had just founded in Nancy. Its sensitivity to the Art nouveau engaged it, as of the beginning of the years 1890, to join the rows of the photo hobbyists eager to make recognize photography like an art. It was the beginning of what is called today the school of the pictorialism in photography, a movement born in the mobility of the Art nouveau and which, in the same spirit, sought to make apply to photography, always regarded as an industrial art, criteria of appreciation in force for the fine arts.

This dichotomy whose still photography at the end suffered of the XIXe century, Hannon made the experiment in its photographic practice of it even. As a photo hobbyist, member of the Association Belgian of photography, and thus in favour of the theses pictorialists, Hannon carried out a work which one can describe as “erudite”, because referring to the rules of the composition, framing and contrast. He used the techniques of pulling sophisticated in vogue near the photographers artists (pulling with coal, with dichromate gum) and invented with ingeniousness some processes making it possible to return the effects of screen and blur, so much at the time required. Beside this official work, which was entitled to the ogee mouldings of the living rooms, Hannon carried out as an engineer an important collection of stereotypes taken during its many voyages abroad where the Solvay company sent it to control the installation of its subsidiary companies.

These photographs, which one knows the negative ones but few pullings, are presented in the form of travel souvenirs, traces of the visited places, without apparent concern of the composition nor of framing. But what, in the spirit of Hannon, was not to undoubtedly be that a book of notes seems today a report of an exceptional quality on the social life - mainly urban life of the underprivileged classes - from Europe, the United States and especially of Russia tsarist of the end of the XIXe century. As a testimony, the work of Hannon takes seat at the sides of the great names of documentary photographic, like Lewis Hine or Walker Evans. However, the high informative value of this report should not occult its astonishing formal qualities. Indeed, the stereotypes of Hannon are as unfinished sketches if one compares them with his photographs pictorialists tallied, drawn and exposed with all the care required for a work of art. But with the passing of time, one discovers that these sketches in fact are controlled in a way surprisingly meticulous person and that they are subjected not to a pictorial esthetics, but with a specifically photographic esthetics, based on the off-registration, the out-field and the against-composition. Hannon must have an incredibly premonitory vision of what would be, thirty years later, the movement of the pure photography, exaltée by Strand and Stieglitz in the United States, or by Feininger and Renger-Patzsch in Germany. The work of Édouard Hannon was rediscovery and studied by the Belgian photographer Gilbert De Keyser, then safeguarded and preserved by photographic Space Contretype, center of contemporary photography, installed since 1988 in the old private mansion of the photographer, in Saint-Gilles, Brussels.

This beautiful residence Art nouveau was built in 1903 by a friend of Édouard Hannon, the architect Jules Brunfaut. Photographic Space Contretype devoted several exposures to Hannon, in particular É. Hannon and the Art nouveau, in 1993.

The esthetic statute of photography appears of an exceptional ambiguity. It gave place to no great general theory, but it is the fact as many estheticians as professional experts. The expression even of “beautiful photograph”, pejorative at much of them, remains laudatory among amateurs, who - exceptional fact as regards art - adopt each day this activity more. “A fortuitous sunbeam or a shade through the way, a oak desiccated by time, a covered stone of foam can wake up a series of thoughts, feelings and imaginations picturesque”: this sentence of the pioneer William H.F. Talbot (1800-1877), who discovered the latent image - compared by Paul Valéry with the emergence of worms perfect out of the “inner language” -, could be contresigned by any gifted amateur of some sensitivity. “Art” is not whereas the pretext with “associations of purely individual ideas”. While the cinema, which, to the eyes of the layman, passed a long time to be only “photograph moving”, has already, and for a long time, its statute of art, for which one invented since 1920 a “tenth MUSE”, photography, after one century and half of existence, remains marked tares of its birth.

1. Firt discussions, first mistakes

We can enumerate three of the tares which marked the beginnings of photography: contradiction between its origins of nature experimental, scientific, in any case free from ideas preconceived on the role of the “daguerreotype”, and the appetites of “realism” to the vague direction, extra-artistic appetites of the public; exhausting the controversy which was established from the start to know a priori if photography were an art, if it destroyed art as the painter Paul Delaroche affirmed it since 1839 or if it could remain without being defined between these two positions; finally the fact that, last the “heroic” period about which one will speak only briefly, the photographers themselves never have, except extremely rare exception, sought to be defined beyond some vague and not very effective proclamations of “originality”, up to one very recent time (which coincided besides with their least chance to be made recognize as artists, because of the increase striking down in the number of the amateurs). It is notable that this phenomenon occurred inside the market governed by the laws of capitalism in time when, even more expensive, cinematographic industry succeeded in being made accept as an art, while obeying more narrowly still the laws of this same market. It is symptomatic that the oldest today remaining daguerreotype is a “work of art” to the second degree; Jacques Daguerre had there the elements which symbolize rather well the cultural luggage which could be it his, apart from the purely scientific concerns: an ancient imitation of nymph, two heads of cherubs, a wrapped bottle of wicker, pointing out the craft industry of the artistic country par excellence, Italy, a sentimental lithography and two other plasters. This “still life”, independently of the tastes which it reveals in its author, opens a way which for a long time was hardly attended. Indeed, at the beginning of photography itself, it is the portrait which triumphs. It is essential to remember that it literally submerged all the other attempts at development of photography during several years. That means, on the aesthetic level, a desire to compete with the painters of portraits, which one knows today who at the time post-romantic the major concerns were not exactitude that their models claimed and besides obtained. The desire of exactitude in the reproduction corresponds, one often noted it, with the final rise of the middle-class (under the reign of Louis-Philippe) which prepares positivism. It is striking to note that holding them of integral realism, out of literary and pictorial matter, were wary of photography; thus, Champfleury exclaimed: “What I see between in my head, goes down in my feather and becomes what I saw [...]. The man, not being machine, cannot return the objects automatically. The novelist chooses, group, distributes; does the daguerreotype try hard so much?” Confused and naive argumentation where the concept of realism reveals its own ambiguities spontaneously (one will reproach in the same way the surrealist “automatism” for being given up with the “facility”). The sarcastic remarks of the largest esthetician of the time, Baudelaire, are of another class. How the portrait, more than the “study” - Delacroix which he likes and even severe Ingres that he admires in make! -, it aims at the first “reconstitutions” of “tragic or gracious” scenes of the history, these groups “of funny and hussies” disguised, who insult “at the same time the divine painting and the sublime art of the actor”. Realism however is not saved: “The company immonde rua, like only one Narcisse, to contemplate his commonplace image on metal.” And to the dandyism of Baudelaire comes to mix its puritanism, when it condemns the stereoscope at a rate of the embarrassing exploitation which was made at once by it by skilful tradesmen: “The love of the obscenity, which is as long-lived in the heart of the man as love of oneself, did not let escape a so beautiful occasion to be satisfied.” On a point, the memories of Nadar give reason to Baudelaire: photographic industry was the “refuge”, if not of “all the missed painters, too badly gifted or too lazy”, at least of a good number of them, and especially of representatives of this Bohemian socially unclassable, at the same time concerned of material and rubbed freedom artistic culture, where coudoyaient themselves “missed painters, missed sculptors, clerks in bankruptcy” (Nadar). Admittedly Baudelaire is unjust towards Delacroix, which in 1854 considers it regrettable that the photography “came so late”, as it had been for Charles Nègre, which about 1860 naively transposed on the fabric its excellent photographs so, supreme honor, to expose to the Living room, as it had been for more specific research of Degas. But, large or small, the painters preserve in front of photography a total attitude which explains its rapid derives from “realism” towards claims of another kind. Full with goodwill, some criticize exceeded the non-problem raised by the exactitude of the “drawings”, as Disderi (1819-1891) believes still necessary to call its tests and even its “photographic calling cards” to the patented format, which enormously lower the cost price of the “portrait”. The example of Lamartine is completely interesting, if one thinks of the real influence which its Course familiar of literature (1859) can have where, having initially pronounced a vigorous anathema against photography, it suddenly changes opinion after having seen the tests on bluish paper of “sculptor” A. Adam-Solomon. It exclaims: “Photography, it is the photographer [...]. It is better than an art, it is a solar phenomenon where the artist collaborates with the sun!” As of this time, photography is thus summoned outside to transform itself into art: juridically, it is allowed like such, “at least in certain cases”, by a decree of the Court of Appeal of Paris (Apr 10, 1862) concerning a business of “plagiarism”. The dominant esthetics which, born in France, was spread at once in all Europe, especially in Great Britain, ratifies the misinterpretation which the expression pictorial photography summarizes. Thus, Nadar - pseudonym of G.F. Tournachon (1820-1910) -, whose certain remarks announce those that the theorists of the “new objectivity will hold” after 1920, is seen decreeing the title of “Titien of photography”, because it also uses “to him” very beautiful velvety blacks in its portraits - what testifies as much to an ignorance of the genius of Titien that his clean. Nadar takes the first air photography in 1858, the first underground photography in 1861; in 1886, it is the first “photographic interview”, where it is made take vis-a-vis the scientist Chevreul centenary; it is necessary to still quote its effigies of Nerval, Baudelaire and Dumas, inter alia.

2. The “escape out of reality”

At that time where the stakes of impressionism are posed occurs a vice of effects of blur, final improvements, complicated chemical treatments, the purpose of which are all acknowledged or unavowed to make it possible photography to compete with painting. The vogue of the new art follows the curve of the general evolution of the company: triumphing positivism a certain “escape succeeds” towards historical phantasms or symbolic systems which are used as counterweight with new problems. At the same time as of innumerable photographers drown their models in the fogs more or less sophisticated where, Bernard Shaw in 1902 will say, “the figures become suddenly indistinct and nonsubstantial, in a way as not very convincing as irrational”, the modern style relaying impressionism, others multiply sets able to compete with those painted by Thomas Couture or Ernest Meissonier. One represents using actors Don Quichotte in his library, or even of the allegorical scenes in the taste of the préraphaélites; H.P. Robinson, whose theoretical works (Picture Making by Photography) will be republished until 1916, did not hesitate to draw vast paperboards, grouping several figures heavily symbolic systems, before carrying them out in its studio using alive models; J.C. Strauss, in Germany manufactures of Frans Hals “on order”; F. Boissonas, in Geneva, pastiche (inter alia) Honore Daumier! In comparison, underhand erotism of the reverend Charles Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll, guard all his freshness, if one thinks that the childish models that it made pose around the topics of Alice to the country of the wonders often did not have for them that the charm of their age. There is no solution of continuity between its work with legendary half (itself destroyed the major part of it) and, beyond the artistic photographs “naked” the laboriously manufactured one since the daguerreotype, according to the taste of each generation, research of authentic artists such as Hans Bellmer (the Headstock, 1936, series of variations), Man Ray, or certain Anglo-American photographers, such Bill Brandt. Thanks to them, the erotism became an authentic component of the esthetics of the light. Thus, about 1860-1900, no ground of discussion was offered which made it possible to the best photographers - in particular Parisian “documentarists” - to continue as artists. The most interesting research remains of a scientific nature (rifle chronophotographic of Étienne Jules Marey, which breaks up the movement, announcing the cinema) or exaspèrent the tendency to “imaginary” (unquestionable spiritistic “photograph” phantom and ectoplasms; Fixed Auguste Strindberg on the plates its experiments of alchemy thanks to the overprinting) in time even where the objective, clinging to the telescope or the microscope, reveals, beyond the utility role that Baudelaire assigned to him in these fields, of new beauties “in a rough state”. 3. End of photography-painting Although also influenced by the style of the British photographers, American photography had had its own evolution, marked in particular by a very sharp taste of the reports, which culminates with the admirable documents on the American Civil War due to Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and Timothy Sullivan, where the scenario writers of westerns will regularly come to seek sources of inspiration. About 1900 however, the “international style” (exported to Japan) included the documentary truth in the rhetoric of the effects: the “matter” (papers of luxury, final improvements by suppression or addition of details, etc) took precedence over the light. It is the time when a esthetician, Robert of Sizeranne, exclaimed: “Photography exceeded the promises of science; it had promised only truth to us, it gave us the beauty”, confusing with this one a vice of tricks (dichromate gum, fatty inks) which pastichent the charcoal, the aquatinte or the washing. About 1907, the American Alfred Stieglitz broke brutally, thanks to a precise theoretical argumentation, with “artistic” photography. Having created, since 1902, a dissenting group of the Camera Club of New York, it condemns not only the final improvement, but the enlarging: it works with a portable apparatus, even under the most difficult conditions (photographs taken in snow). In 1910, an art gallery opens its doors with its group (Photo-Secession), however that Stieglitz plays a part of foreground in the diffusion of paintings cubists in the United States: one could say that it photographs some sometimes undertook to make cubism according to nature. The choice of apparently dehumanized subjects, the importance of framing, the introduction of repetitive elements intended to support the impression of rate/rhythm or on the contrary the juxtaposition (for example of large letters of poster and an angle of leprous wall) explain why Picasso has, in its turn, recognized a research close to his in its work. But it is not a question of a banal transposition of the sights cubists by another medium: in 1921, Stieglitz leaves to the conquest the “pure” photography which rests, to each test, in each “plan”, the same problem: “a maximum of details for a maximum of simplification”, that it less solves in a “realistic” direction, as one could believe it, than Platonic. It photographs clouds which it calls of the “songs of the sky” and of the “equivalents of emotion”. The Photo-Secession group had only a few years of existence, but it is thanks to him that the originality of photography like artistic medium could be marked without return. Independently of their particular concerns, the artists who composed it indeed introduced the problem of the illusion of reality, problem today in the center of many discussions of the theorists of the cinema. Their activity was in a field where this problem was not encumbered by the data concerning “continuity” in the space and the time, which affect cinematographic criticism today. On the other hand, it is notable that Paul Strand, the most gifted photographer that about 1916 the Photo-Secession revealed, passed in a second part of his career to the film corealisation. It brought there the same power, the same party taken to reach essence starting from a banal or quasi abstract detail: “Objectivity is the genuine gasoline of photography, its contribution to art and also its limitation. The problem of the photographer is to clearly see the limits and the potentialities of its medium.” With him “pure” photography joined the dumb life of the objects: “If you are alive, a vegetable, a barrier mean something for you.



Die Welt STI schön (“the world is beautiful”), this title of a album-proclamation of the German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch (1928), reveals well the internal contradiction of the “illusion of reality”: Renger-Patzsch condemns any faking, any research of the “effects”, all the more remarkable attitude as it is almost contemporary crisis expressionnist of the German cinema; but while privileging more subtly than the Masters of the Photo-Secession such detail of nature (a branch in flowers, a heap of old stones), it introduces the thesis according to which the beauty of the world depends on the choice made by the eye which looks at it. The photographic image, by its “objectivity” or its “mechanical character”, which is that answers best the remark of Spinoza: “I allot to nature neither beauty nor ugliness, convinced that I am that the things are beautiful or ugly only compared to our imagination (faculty to create images).” A third current of this time is represented by the researchers who are at the origin of the first “abstract” stereotypes completely. Since 1913, Alvin Coburn breaks traditional space by its sights in diving of New York and especially by its triangle of mirrors placed in front of the objective. The painter Christian Schad obtains in Zurich, in 1918, of the images without camera in illuminant of the objects posed on significant surface. In Bauhaus, László Moholy-Nagy remains attached to graphics. However these three currents converge towards an “etymological” definition of the photographic art: it would be a “description of the light” by itself, the support (prone, material pseudo-pictorial) being gradually tiny room to the state of pretext. The emotion or the reflexion would have to even be born from the luminosity. It is from this point of view that it is necessary to appreciate the rather exceptional theoretical contribution of Man Ray. With him, the divorce between painting and photography are paradoxically consumed, since it uses the two techniques, by radically excluding them one from the other. By its invention of the “rayographes”, photography does not have any more a support of the whole and, according to its beautiful formula, there is “the new one under the sun”. If it is being at the same time excellent and meticulous portraitist and the author of “technical” successes which must much with pure poetic imagination, it is not only with the influence of the Photo-Secession, of dadaism and of surrealism that it must, it is also with this conferred freedom, according to its own statements, by a “practice absolutely familiar of the trade”. Freedom which recently enabled him to turn over its proclamation of 1937: “Photography is not art” while saying: “Art is not photography.” Cultivated by amateurs as of the origins, the photomontage and the photocollage which lead to lend to a preliminary unreal composition “all appearances of something of reality which was photographed”, were integrated from the start in the current of renewal of the forms which started with the cubism and during the period 1910-1920. From a sometimes hard imagination, they passed to political propaganda with John Heartfield and El Lissitsky. The prevalent tendency since 1930 combines a certain poetic taste, even fantastic, taste of the strangeness, with the social realism, which finds the verism of Eugene Atget (1857-1927), the acuity of the “new glance” not excluding an artistic will. That one thinks of the school Czechoslovakian, remained remarkably faithful to the surrealist influences of his origins (1935), and better still in Brassaï (1899-1984), precursor of all the current French school, which mixes freshness with the emotion with humour and picturesque social, in particular, at Izis and Robert Doisneau. This last tendency at the same time “is sublimated” and exceeded by Henri Cartier-Bresson (born in 1908), who integrates his plastic concerns into the report, conceived like a research of the “decisive moment”, excluding the anecdote and transferring the instantaneous one to the permanent one.

4. Trend(Tendency) the most recent

After the backward flow of “pure photography”, a convenient simplification consisted in classifying the photographs in “abstract” and “realistic”. But this simplification violated the inevitable phenomenologic relation: there are not two reports/ratios different from the eye (or the objective) to an object whatever it is. At most it was seen supplanted by its own image at a rate of the “deformation” of this one. Many modern painters were subject to the influence of “page-settings” of photographers however realistic, but who cut out space in an unexpected way. As Rene Huyghe noted it about 1950, the objective for of “eye of fish” (eye-fish) immediately carries out the spherical prospect which required formerly painters of hard calculations and short cuts cunning. The dispersion of the current tendencies was accentuated under the effect of extra-artistic events. The first is placed before the Second World war: it is the birth of the great report, with all the constraints which it involves and also its possibilities of “return to the subject” more or less with feeling, but also if necessary deeply human, such as Robert Capa (1913-1954) imposed it, witness of the tragedies of our time. A little later, at least with regard to the reflexion of the photographers on their activity, one attends the development of the photography known as scientific, which had already modified the aesthetic sensitivity by revealing unknown aspects of the Universe. This one allowed creation (at the price of light fakings, like the “catch continues”) images which, by their strange aspect, acquire an aesthetic value. More recently, it let play the imagination of some creators, starting from structures studied under all the aspects, such the “adventures of matters” of Jean-Pierre Sudre (1962). It is necessary to evoke, finally, the push of “subjectivism” which, at the end of the Second World war, caused the attempts at Otto Steinert (1915-1978) creating in 1949 the Fotoform group (it was flattered to increase the field of photography and to even reverse the step of it in “going up” psychological analysis until the image) and those, frankly irrational, of Minor White (1908-1976), whose “mirages” communicate to rare forms unexpected significances and influenced a whole group of American photographers who believe in the “magic” possibilities of the objective. The color could have appeared a determining element of renewal of photographic esthetics. Enough curiously, the artists was a long time reticent in its connection, showing it “to distort” the purely plastic reports/ratios suggested or underlined by the “black and white”. More spectacular than really conclusive, Essays d' Erwin Fieger (born in 1913) announce an extreme attempt to violate this taboo, using “phantasmagoric” receipts which are unaware of reality deliberately. Perhaps it is about a non-problem, due to a kind of timidity in front of a whole of processes which, announced since 1869 and independently one of the other by Charles Cros and Louis Ducos de Hauron, were developed with chances of infallibility only during the time 1940-1950. The example of Gjon Mili (1904-1984) shows that the passage from one “technique” to another does not modify ipso facto an aesthetic design. When it photographs colors the jump of a frog in water, or Picasso drawing in the air with a flashlight, or the “successive installations” of a dancer moving, it continues to want “to contradict” the word of Brassaï: “Photography is the opposite of the movement.” The same tendency is found in the young Italian school (Fontana) which stylizes to the extreme of the fragments of reality and obtains an equivalent of “paysagism abstracted” with the pure colors, subtly granted or désaccordées. The opposite school all the candid photography which works in ambient light without worrying neither about the values neither of the framing nor of the angle of catch (two concepts too often confused), although being able to claim precursors such as Edward Weston in 1937, aims in fact “to exceed” any aesthetic quarrel. It is interesting to note that it coincides in time with the beginnings of the crisis of the American cinema. One can raise, on this subject, that the photographic anthologies of on the other side of the Atlantic often opened their pages with large “directors of the photography” (operators chiefs) of Hollywood, from which the varied styles are transposed of the screen to the ordinary objective. One of most eminent, John Alton (born in 1901), published about 1950 two theoretical works which became “bibles” on the other side of the Atlantic: Photography and Lighting and Painting with Light. Lastly, the diversity of the aesthetic tendencies underwent the “recoil” due to the apparent standardization of photography as regards cinema, mode and publicity. 5. Sociology of photography One already saw how much the development photography was related to the evolution of capitalism in France and England. As it is not astonishing as the first signs of a change of design occurred in the United States in one period when this country lived its first great crisis. The goal of Brady and his assistants was characteristic besides: to show the war to avoid its return. This tradition persisted and grows in the United States. About 1900, in fact photographic investigations bring the destruction of the slums of New York. Roosevelt will call upon famous photographers to support some of his social campaigns. Meanwhile, the example will have been followed by the U.S.S.R., on scale quantitatively less but aesthetically such an interesting, especially because of the influence of futuristic and modernistic during the first years which followed the revolution of October. This use of photography like social tool was later on victim of its diffusion even and the conditions of commercial operating of the great report. It is however necessary to recall the splendid exposure of “planetary sociology” organized in New York by a veteran of the Photo-Secession, Edward Steichen, in 1955: The Family of Man. It selected there, on two million tests received from 68 countries, 503 photographs which constitute the panorama of contemporary humanity, “condemned” to the unit and fraternity. One can consider the sociology of photography in opposite direction, i.e. by taking the point of view of the public. It was noticed that the request had been limited very a long time to the portrait, to which were added rudiments of information (portraits of celebrities, “picturesque” sights) and certain social requirements (photographs of group). This request could not have in theory of artistic exit, and it persisted by maintaining a craft industry; but it in addition completely changed under the influence of other activities, primarily publicity and the fashion: a typical case is that of Richard Avedon who, large photographer of mode, became a portraitist in turn moving (Marylin Monroe) and extremely wild for some of its models belonging to the “high society”. For a long time there was not in Europe of very real request with regard to the photography conceived like an independent art (single tests or with limited pulling). It is probably because each one thinks of being able to be a photographer and that the material required to be it is acquired easily: since 1968, more half of the French hearths had an apparatus. Reciprocally, the majority of the professionals, after having had to support to see illustrations drawn or engraved “according to a photograph” by pseudo-artistic prejudice, in general agreed to sell their photographs at agencies which always did not mention their signature; but since the years the 1980 photographs of agency are not anonymous any more. A number growing of them try to become their clean “producers” to maintain their copyright on their works. The teaching of photography exists in the United States, but it is absent or embryonic almost everywhere else. There still, one can note that the assimilation, indefensible in healthy logic, of the cinema with photography finds a justification practical in the fact that the majority of the photo hobbyists tend to be transformed into scenario writers amateurs. The empirical statute of the fixing of the “privileged” moment - this moment was a fragment of object - is taken again and denied by the desire to fix “at the same time” the moment and the movement which is its negation. As well with regard to its social diffusion as for the few aesthetic reflexions as it caused, photography seems thus condemned to vegetate in margin of the medium much more powerful which developed from it.