PHOTO Collection August 2013 - ARTEdownload.sales.arte.tv/files/Collection_PHOTO_-_VE... · It was...

PHOTO CollectionAugust 2013

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PHOTOEvery snapshot is an enigma, the capture of an instant that remainsfrozen in time. But what happened before? and after? Or just outsideof frame? The sublime series now retraces the adventure of this artform, from its beginnings to the present, revealing the hidden storiesand trade secrets concealed in a series of photographs.

AUTHORStan NEUMANN

COPRODUCERSARTE FRANCE, CAMERA LUCIDA

PRODUCTIONSFORMAT

12 x 26 ', 2012AVAILABLE RIGHTS

TV - DVD - VOD - Non-theatrical rights -Internet

VERSIONSEnglish - German - French

TERRITORY(IES)Worldwide.

Every photograph is an enigma. A moment locked into a rectangle. We will never knowwhat happened just before it was taken, or just next to it.What had to be moved, adjusted, waited for or provoked for all the elements to suddenlycome together in the frame and produce an image that once seen, is never forgotten?

Compared to painting, the rules of the photography game are incredibly simple, requiringnothing more than a few pieces in a minimalist game of chess - a subject, a frame, light,a lens, a shutter, and a base. The importance of these pieces varies according to theirposition, and they are moved around permanently in relation to each other.

The collection invites viewers to discover from the inside "how it's done", and imaginethemselves as actors in the complex game that is played out between photography andthe real.

LIST OF EPISODESSURREALIST PHOTOGRAPHY (THE)

PRIMITIVES OF PRHOTOGRAPHY 1850-1960

(THE)

NEW VISION: EXPERIMENTAL

PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE 1920S

PRESS USAGE

FOUND IMAGES

AFTER PHOTOGRAPHY?

INVENTORS (THE)

PICTORIALISM

NEW GERMAN OBJECTIVITY (THE)

PHOTOGRAPHING INTIMACY

STAGED PHOTOGRAPHY

CONCEPTUAL PHOTOGRAPHY

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SURREALIST PHOTOGRAPHY (THE)This documentary offers us, on an original and amusing way, the "trade secret " of the surrealist photography.

AUTHORStan NEUMANN

COPRODUCERSCAMERA LUCIDA PRODUCTIONS, ARTE

FRANCEFORMAT


TV - DVD - VOD - Non-theatrical rightsVERSIONS

English - German - FrenchTERRITORY(IES)

Worldwide.

Their names are Man Ray, Dora Maar, Alvarez Bravo, Brassai, André Kertesz orHenri Cartier-Bresson. They're counting amongst the greatest photographers of the 20thcentury.During the 1930's, their images embodied the most intense and lively side of surrealism.

The images are questionned trough animation techniques. They're dismantled, put backtogether again, brought back into play. Those images are " brought to life ", showing usthe choices, the serendipity and their inner strength.Each photography shown in the film becomes a story on its own, a little photographicdrama who's only ending while reaching the finale picture.The audience gets inside the process, the work on light and frame, the superimposing,solarisation, photomontage and slowly becomes itself part of this intricate game betweenphotography, imagination and reality.

PRIMITIVES OF PRHOTOGRAPHY1850-1960 (THE)

In the middle of the 19th century, 25 years after its invention,photography is still considered as a simple scientific curiosity.

AUTHORStan NEUMANN


FRANCEFORMAT





But between 1850 and 1860 a dozen of photographers, in France and in England, willget in a struggle to get photography acknowledged as an art.

It will be the decade of Nadar, Le Gray, Baldus, Robison, Rejlander, Fenton. They willbe the first ones to explore all posibilities of photographical creation and of its relationsto reality.

On an original and amusing way, this documentary offers us the " trade secret " of thosepioneers of photography that have invented in just a few years a complex photographicalgrammar through several supports and technics of great diversity.

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NEW GERMAN OBJECTIVITY (THE)This episode recounts the New Objectivity evolution in photographicpractice, the symbol of which is the Dusseldorf school. For theBechers, photography was documentary in nature.

AUTHORStan NEUMANN


FRANCEFORMAT




TERRITORY(IES)Worldwide

The pact that linked it to the real from its birth was guaranteed by the technique itself.Today that is no longer the case: photography has moved on from that stage, gainingfreedom and losing innocence.

Born in Germany in the 1930s, Bernd Becher and his wife Hilla set out on a strangeundertaking: to create a photographic inventory of industrial buildings that were destinedto disappear, such as water-towers, silos and blast furnaces.In the space of 30 years, the "Dusseldorf School", the Bechers and their "pupils" - CandidaHöfer, Petra Wünderlich, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Andréas Gursky - were toradically transform photographic practice.

They retained a few key characteristics from the Bechers' teachings: attention to distance,apparent objectivity, and a predilection for straight lines. But each of these photographersreinterpreted this model and developed their own photographic universe. For some,colour became a tool to reinterpret the real, while others remained faithful to black andwhite. All of them produced very large prints. Photography was no longer a simpledocument, it was a work in its own right, able to rival the paintings that hung on museumwalls.

STAGED PHOTOGRAPHYThis episode analyses the main processes in this deconstruction ofthe "pseudo" truth of photographic language: composition, light,breakdown into narrative scenes, the use of figures, set, accessoriesand studio work, or on the contrary, the staging of a veritableperformance.

AUTHORSAlain NAHUM, Stan NEUMANN


PRODUCTIONSFORMAT



VERSIONSEnglish - French


For almost the entire 20th century, photography was mainly realist. But from the1960s, "staged photography" was no longer considered naïve or passé, and made amajor comeback, enriched by the external influences of film, theatre, performance andsculpture. This photography that was "infused" by other mediums played on the ambiguityof photographic realism.

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NEW VISION: EXPERIMENTALPHOTOGRAPHY OF THE 1920S

Criticism of the 1920s heralded the arrival of "The NewPhotographer", which was a typically European phenomenon. Thisphotographic avant-garde, often politically located on the far-left,was embodied by Moholy-Nagy, Umbo, El Lissitzky and Rodtchenko.

AUTHORStan NEUMANN


PRODUCTIONSFORMAT





Like Constructivism and Bauhaus, which it was close to, it broke away from the formerrules and norms of the "good photography" of professional photographers.

The New Vision was intricately linked to the urban culture it came from, in which high-angle shots, low-angle shots, deliberately imbalanced images, unfamiliar shots, distortionand other treasures glorified the dynamism and modernity of machines and cities.

Experimental in nature, it focused on camera-free images (photograms), photomontages,collages and overprinting. Anything that could revitalize human vision via photography"educated the eye by optical mechanics".

But this experimental utopia did not manage to withstand the major crisis of the 1930sand the rise of totalitarianism regimes, which imposed, both in Germany and the U.S.,the return of "good photography", realism and academism.

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PRESS USAGESome of the 20th century's most famous photographers, such asHenri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Brassaï and Weegee owe theirfame to the illustrated press, and its printing of their images on anunprecedented scale.



FRANCEFORMAT





The alliance of signature photography and mainstream press led photography to becomethe popular image of the 20th century. The magazines that started appearing in the1920s - such as BIZ in Germany, Vu in France, the Weekly Illustrated and Picture Post inEngland, and Life in the United States - broke away from the routine of the first illustratedmagazines that used photography merely as an accompaniment for text. With these newmagazines, photographs became primary vehicles of information. They were spectacular,accessible to all, and a pledge of truth - in appearance, at least.The photographer became a special witness, a star in his more or less specialised field:Weegee in crime reporting, Robert Capa in war reporting and Brassaï in poetic realism.

But in the decades following World War II, the photographers became less willing tolet the increasingly conformist magazines exercise their authority over their images.The magazines, for example, freely edited their photographs, reframing them or addingcaptions that altered their meanings.

The leading photographers - Robert Capa, Roland Seymour and Cartier-Bresson - startedto fight for their photos to be respected and considered as works in their own right, ratherthan as mere accounts.

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PICTORIALISM50 years after it was invented, photography once again sought to rivalpainting. The debate was as old as photography itself: is photographymerely a simple, mechanical "imitation" of reality, or can it interpretreality subjectively, as drawing and painting can?

AUTHORStan NEUMANN


FRANCEFORMAT





Turning its back on confronting reality, the Pictorialist movement endeavoured to practisea photography that was stripped of its original defect - its objective and mechanicalprecision - to produce the subjectivity and "soft focus" of drawing and painting.Pictorialism shared a refusal of the modern world with its contemporary, symbolism. Itpreferred outdated or timeless themes, such as historical subjects, mythology, religion,landscapes and academic nudes.Reactionary in its themes and aesthetics, Pictorialism featured great daring of form,developing processes (such as soft focus, special lenses, printing effects, and drawing,engraving or painting on prints) that today's most post-modern photographers would notshy away from.It was an "inverted avant-garde" in which the grand masters, Robert Demachy, AlvinLangdon Coburn, Frank Eugene, Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz deployed theiracute creativity in making photography not appear to be photography. The movementtook the limelight for about twenty years, in Europe and the United States.

INVENTORS (THE)How to produce an image of reality when one could neither draw norpaint? A dream, combined with an intellectual approach and variousdirections of scientific research produced an invention that enabledman to capture an exact image of reality, using neither pencil norpaintbrush.

AUTHORSJuliette GARCIAS, Stan NEUMANN


PRODUCTIONSFORMAT





1839 marked the "official" birth of photography.

Some seek to reduce the invention of photography to an obstacle course from which theshrewd Daguerre emerged triumphant, once the good-natured Niepce had abandonedhis pursuit, and thanks to the slowness of the perfectionist Talbot and the discreet Bayard.Photography, which featured myriad technical and artistic possibilities, was multi-facetedand progressive. It revolutionised our perspective and transformed our relationship toreality.

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PHOTOGRAPHING INTIMACYPhotography would appear to be extravert in nature, done to showus reality, the world at large and the "other". But in the eighties, amovement appeared that sought to escape this "objective" vocation,and to transform the camera into a daily logbook, an apparatus ofintrospection, a personal diary.



PRODUCTIONSFORMAT





The movement was to take on a radical dimension under the impetus of photographerswho were sometimes referred to as "diarists".

FOUND IMAGESIt is an unexpected consequence of the emergence of photography: Inthe space of one and half Century, a new visual memory has appearedmade of more than one billion photographic images, images of artists,of professionals or amateurs.

AUTHORStan NEUMANN


PRODUCTIONSFORMAT





From the 19th Century, painters have collected documentary photographs using them asmodels for their own works. The artistic avant-garde of the 20th Century takes hold theprinciple. During the 1920's and 1930's, a lot of artists are widely using the scrapbooking(Hannah Höch, George Grosz, Walker Evans). These << collections >> regularly leavethe private circle and become a work base (collage, photomontage, etc).

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CONCEPTUAL PHOTOGRAPHYConceptual Photography, which appeared in the 1960s, took up theancient quarrel between photography and painting, in its own way,totally inversing the terms.

AUTHORStan NEUMANN


FRANCEFORMAT





Instead of criticising photography in the name of painting, as had been done in thepast, painters (from Andy Warhol to Ed Rucha and Bruce Nauman) used photography tocriticise painting, engaging in an outright attack on the notion of "fine-arts" and the elitistcharacter of artistic creation.

To reinvent painting, these painters used the essential characteristics of this photography- its absence of affect, its ease of use and its ability to capture the ephemeral.

AFTER PHOTOGRAPHY?Will photography survive the 21st century? With the progressive butinevitable disappearance of traditional photography, the questionhas been asked since the 1980s.

AUTHORSStan NEUMANN, Juliette GARCIAS


FRANCEFORMAT





Photographers have responded to the death of a certain type of photography in two ways.Some of them have chosen to return to the past, seeking to re-establish the simplicityof old cameras and practices (photographers such as Daido Moryiama, RosangelaRenno and Michel Campeau).

Others on the contrary, have extended the limits of experimentation, carrying out camera-less photography, making use of today's many resources - such as software, scannersand the Internet - to make images (photographers such as Joan Fontcuberta,Thomas Ruff, and Brandon Lattu).

A third group of photographers is exploring frontiers and crafted solutions, betweennostalgia and futurism, in a sort of alternative photography (using Lomography,disposable cameras and Tichy's makeshift cameras).

THEMATIC INDEX

ARTS - CULTURE.............................................................PHOTO..................................................................................................... 6

PHOTO� � .................................................................................................................................... 6SURREALIST�PHOTOGRAPHY�(THE)................................................................................................ 7PRIMITIVES�OF�PRHOTOGRAPHY�1850-1960�(THE)� ................................................................. 7NEW�GERMAN�OBJECTIVITY�(THE)� ........................................................................................... 8STAGED�PHOTOGRAPHY� ............................................................................................................ 8NEW�VISION:�EXPERIMENTAL�PHOTOGRAPHY�OF�THE�1920S� ............................................. 9PRESS�USAGE� � ...................................................................................................................... 10PICTORIALISM� .............................................................................................................................. 11INVENTORS�(THE)� ........................................................................................................................ 11PHOTOGRAPHING�INTIMACY� ..................................................................................................... 12FOUND�IMAGES� ............................................................................................................................ 12CONCEPTUAL�PHOTOGRAPHY� � ........................................................................................... 13AFTER�PHOTOGRAPHY?� � ...................................................................................................... 13

ALPHABETICAL INDEX

AFTER�PHOTOGRAPHY?............................................................................................................................................. 13CONCEPTUAL�PHOTOGRAPHY................................................................................................................................... 13FOUND� IMAGES............................................................................................................................................................ 12INVENTORS�(THE)......................................................................................................................................................... 11NEW�GERMAN�OBJECTIVITY�(THE)............................................................................................................................ 8NEW�VISION:�EXPERIMENTAL�PHOTOGRAPHY�OF�THE�1920S............................................................................. 9PHOTO............................................................................................................................................................................ 6PHOTOGRAPHING�INTIMACY...................................................................................................................................... 12PICTORIALISM............................................................................................................................................................... 11PRESS�USAGE.............................................................................................................................................................. 10PRIMITIVES�OF�PRHOTOGRAPHY�1850-1960�(THE)................................................................................................. 7STAGED�PHOTOGRAPHY............................................................................................................................................ 8SURREALIST�PHOTOGRAPHY�(THE).......................................................................................................................... 7

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