In the context of this thread, the short essay that Michel Boujut wrote about the photograph three months before his death is interesting.
In English, I would render the title of his essay as The Photos are Watching Us. In the essay, Boujut argues that it is important to be true to the context and meaning of a photograph. The occasion for the essay was the decision by one of France's largest, reputable publishers to use Strand's photograph on the cover of a new novel by Phillipe Besson. Here is what the cover looks like: http://livre.fnac.com/a3101965/Phili...rmi-les-hommes
Boujut was offended by this. Noting that Besson is himself Charentais, meaning that he should have known better, Boujut wrote:
Comment et pourquoi la photo de Paul Strand a-t-elle atterri là ? Se posant comme un cheveu sur la soupe. Car le jeune homme du photographe n'a strictement rien à voir avec celui du romancier: ni par l'époque, ni par l'appartenance sociale, ni par le look. Détournement d'une image, l'icône réduite à une tête de gondole.
In English:
How and why did Strand's photograph wind up on the cover of this novel? It is completely out of place. The young man in the photograph has nothing to do with the main character of the novel: nothing to do with the era, the society and the style of the time. The image has been hijacked and turned into a marketing gimmick.*
Boujut proceeds to talk about a Robert Doisneau photograph and the disconnect between the circumstances under which it was taken and the way that it was interpreted and used. He doesn't name the photograph, but it is unquestionably the one below. It is called At the Café, Chez Fraysse, Rue de Seine, 1958.
Boujut's tale of this photograph is quite brief, but it led me to have a look on the internet, where I found an article by Professor Terry Barrett called Photographs and Contexts that tells the tale in more detail: http://www.terrybarrettosu.com/pdfs/...AndCont_97.pdf
Apparently, Doisneau happened to be at Café Fraysse on rue de Seine, noticed the man and the woman in the photograph and asked to take their picture. They agreed. Eventually, the photograph appeared in the popular magazine Le Point as part of a spread on Paris cafés. Then it got hijacked. Without Doisneau's consent, it was published in a brochure on the evils of alcohol abuse, and then in a French scandal sheet under the title "Prostitution in the Champs-Elysées". And that isn't all. New York's Museum of Modern Art owns a print of the photograph, and its Director of Photography, John Szarkowski, wrote a book called Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art. In the book, he talks about the photograph thus:
Most photographers of the past generation have demonstrated unlimited sympathy for the victims of villainous or imperfect societies, but very little sympathy for, or even interest in, those who are afflicted by their own human frailty. Robert Doisneau is one of the few whose work has demonstrated that even in a time of large terrors, the ancient weaknesses and sweet venial sins of ordinary individuals have survived. On the basis of his pictures one would guess that Doisneau actually likes people, even as they really are.
I didn't get that quote from Professor Barrett's paper, where he quotes only a couple of phrases. I got it from a current, active blog about photography, where in a 2010 post it is described as a "fantastic insight", although the author of the blog isn't quite sure whether to accept it: http://one125.net/post/323018076/at-...de-seine-paris
What is the truth? The man in the photograph was a professor at France's most important School of Fine Arts, located not far from the café, and he and the woman agreed to let Doisneau photograph them. Boujut says that the man was so embarrassed before his wife and colleagues, not to mention ridiculed and hounded, that he sued. Boujut says that he lost the action. Barrett thinks that he won. Either way, he lost, and in Boujut's view, so did the photograph.
Anyway, what I find interesting is that François Julien-Labruyère and Michel Boujut, working from a different cultural and historical understanding, approach Strand's photograph quite differently from those of us who don't share that understanding. It is also striking that this photograph was known in France, apparently before Boujut ran down the story of how it was made, as Jeune homme en colère. It appears that in France it is obvious that it is a photograph of a young man showing a little anger, yet not a single person in this thread, myself included, put that interpretation on it. Do the French see something that we don't, or is their interpretation the result of the title, in French, telling them how to interpret it?
*People who read French will know that my translation avoids being literal regarding some idioms that work very well in French, but rather less well in English. The first two sentences, translated more literally, read: "How and why did Strand's photograph land there? It sits there like a hair in a bowl of soup". The word détournement has been appropriated into English, but I translated it, losing some of its richness of meaning - the word denotes not just hijacking, but subversion, a kind of plagiarism - because it is not yet common in English. And a tête de gondole, which I translate as a marketing gimmick, is more literally the French phrase for a display at the end of a store aisle where the sales people put items that they want to highlight/push; in other words, it is premium display space. Why "head of the gondola"? Maybe because a display running the length of an aisle, with its often curved ends, looks a little like a gondola.
Originally Posted by Ken Lee
June it can pour rain. July/August, avoid like the plague. Way too hot and way too many tourists.
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