Lecture: What can photography do? Photography, art history and staging

A lecture titled “Que peut la photographie ?” (What can photography do?) takes place at the Caumont Centre d’art in Aix-en-Provence, exploring how photography, art history and staging intertwine. National lecturer Laurent Genest delivers the talk.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, a painter who became a photographer

Before he took up the camera, Henri Cartier-Bresson trained as a painter. From 1926 he spent two years in the studio of André Lhote, where he was taught a theory built on strict composition, geometry and the Golden Ratio. He kept a strong taste for composing and staging his images throughout his life, and combined it with the improvisation, chance and spontaneity so dear to the Surrealists.

Jeff Wall and “staged photography”

The lecture takes Jeff Wall as its example to ask what photography can do, and how it thinks every bit as much as painting does. Regarded as the founder of “staged photography”, he builds works of great complexity and subtlety that refer precisely to Velázquez or Manet. In them he reconsiders our relationship to the image, and therefore the very meaning of art.

Other works by Wall lead back to the question of documentary photography, of which Henri Cartier-Bresson was one of the best-known figures worldwide.