Tobacco.org

'Controversies' in Paris - When a Picture Is Worth a Thousand Debates 

All this is the familiarly messy, philosophical heart of photography, and it’s also the subject of a show that just closed here, itself a mess. “Controversies: A Legal and Ethical History of Photography” was organized by Christian Pirker and Daniel Girardin, a lawyer and a curator from Switzerland, where the exhibition originated. Louvre-length, two-hour lines daily snaked out the door of the Bibliothèque Nationale here until the end of last month. (The show moves on to South America.) Inside, scrums of visitors clustered before 80 or so pictures, more or less famous troublemakers, spanning the era of the daguerreotype through Abu Ghraib. . . .

A mess, as I said. But willy-nilly, some big questions arose. The biggest, as Mr. Girardin ventured by telephone the other day, was, “What is possible to show in a photograph?” He elaborated: “What does society accept or refuse? Why are some pictures shown over and over, and then they suddenly become unacceptable?”

In that case he was alluding to a portrait by Boris Lipnitzki from 1946, not a remarkable photograph but a curious case. Jean-Paul Sartre leans over the footlights at the Théâtre Antoine, pinching the remains of a smoldering cigarette between his fingers. This is the picture that in 2005 the Bibliothèque Nationale doctored for the cover of a catalog for a Sartre exhibition. The library expunged the cigarette. Nearly a decade earlier French postal authorities, as part of a national anti-smoking campaign, issued a stamp based on a famous snapshot by Gisèle Freund of André Malraux, tousled, perennial cigarette between lips. Authorities guillotined the cigarette.

That rightly burned French critics who decried — this was the French equivalent of freedom fries, you might say — what they called American-style political correctness, notwithstanding that the history of photography is rife with subterfuges concocted in the name of some greater social good, American and otherwise.

Jump to full article »