Une histoire photographique des émotions

How, over the past two centuries, has photography — a medium of surface and appearance — endeavored to account for emotions? How has it managed to capture what resembles that movement of bodies, fleeting or more prolonged, that we call emotion? These are some of the questions posed by this exhibition, which, from the nineteenth century to the present day, examines how photographers from very diverse backgrounds — scientists, reporters, artists, amateurs — have addressed this issue. It will consider both images whose explicit purpose is to seize, document, study, or stage the expression of emotions for a variety of ends (scientific, narrative, commercial…), and images whose primary and avowed vocation is to elicit emotion in the viewer.

While film theory has extensively accommodated emotions, writings on photography have, with few exceptions, remained more reticent. From facial features to bodily vocabulary, the exhibition therefore seeks to write a photographic history of human emotions by juxtaposing a wide range of genres: photojournalism and candid shots, elaborate stagings, attempts at visual codifications of emotions, propaganda, advertising imagery, and animal photography will all be brought into the discussion; the expression of emotions between art and science, the visual codification of emotions in the age of mass media and facial-recognition systems, the visual equivalences between human passions and animal passions, the emotions of the individual and those of crowds, the expression of intense emotions as well as the absence of emotion, emotion conceived as spectacle, and finally the limits and dead ends of the photographic representation of emotions will be among the avenues explored.

Curator: Quentin Bajac

Cover: Germaine Krull, Study for La Folle d’Itteville, 1931. Estate Germaine Krull, Museum Folkwang, Essen. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Guy Carrard