La Recherche photographique: histoire-esthétique was a specialised peer-reviewed bi-annual French journal, published from September 1986 to spring 1997, and edited by Paris Audiovisuel and the University of Paris 8.

Foundation In 1980, Jean-Luc Monterosso (born in 1947), president of Paris Audiovisuel and founder/director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, and who created the Mois de Photo in Paris and the Grand Prix Paris Match for photojournalism (with Roger Thérond),Kathrin Yacavone "Un courant commençait à se dessiner... ": interview with Jean-Luc Monterosso, July 2014, Nottingham French Studies 53(2):136-138 DOI: 10.3366/nfs.2014.0081 in 1986 founded the magazine La Recherche photographique with Christian Mayaud of Université Paris VIII.

Context The magazine, like its earlier-established contemporary Les Cahiers de la photographie, emerged in a lively decade for the medium and its critique, breaking with strong traditions of the Beaux Arts in France which had hindered photography's acceptance as a legitimate subject of art historical research until the late 1970s, when the first courses on the history of photography were commenced by Michel Frizot at the University of Dijon and the University Paris-Sorbonne.Philippe Dubois, « De l'image-trace à l'image-fiction », Études photographiques [En ligne], 34 | Printemps 2016, mis en ligne le 01 juin 2016, consulté le 04 janvier 2021. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesphotographiques/3593

This late academic attention to the medium (as compared to North America, and other European countries), arriving in the early 1980s, meant that the field of photographic studies in France incorporated perspectives and methodologies outside traditional art history, including semiology (Roland Barthes),Roland Barthes (1957) Mythologies Paris: SeuilBarthes articles "The Photographic Message," "Rhetoric of the Image," and "The Third Meaning", translated and collected in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 3–62 sociology (Pierre Bourdieu),Pierre Bourdieu, with Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, and Dominique Schnapper, (1965) Un art moyen: Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie, Paris: Minuit and psychoanalysis (François Soulages).François Soulages et al., (1986) Photographie et inconscient: Séminaire de philosophie, octobre 1985–janvier 1986, Paris: Osiris, 1986

Support from the socialist government of François Mitterrand and its cultural minister, Jack Lang, to promote photography on a national scale,Gaëlle Morel, "La figure de l'auteur," Études photographiques, no. 13 (July 2003)Gaëlle Morel, "Entre art et culture," Études photographiques, no. 16 (May 2005) resulted in the foundation of the Centre Pompidou in 1977 and Paris Audiovisuel (co-publisher of La Recherche photographique) in 1978, the inauguration of the Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne photography collection and establishment of its Cabinet de la Photographie in 1981; contemporary with the Musée d'Orsay's own in 1978; added to Jean-Claude Lemagny's expansion of the collection at the BnF (1971 onward); and encouraged publications on the medium in France of this decade of the 1980s; the book (translated from Italian) by Franco Vaccari, Photography and the technological unconscious in 1981;Vaccari, F. (1981). La photographie et l'inconscient technologique. Paris: Créatis Hervé Guibert's 1981 L'Image fantôme,Guibert Hervé. (1981). <<L'>>Image fantôme Texte imprimé. éditions de Minuit the translation of Susan Sontag's, On photography, released in 1982 (from the English original, 1977); Michel Foucault's sole treatise on photography Thought and Emotion (1982);"La pensée, l'émotion", in Michals (D.), Photographier de 1958 d 1982, Paris, musée d'Art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1982, pp. III-VII. Dits Ecrits tome IV texte n°307 Denis Roche's La Disparition des lucioles also in 1982;Roche, D. (1982). La disparition des lucioles: (réflexions sur l'acte photographique). Paris: L'Étoile. Henri Van Lier's Philosophie de la photographie of 1983;Lier, H. . (1983). Philosophie de la photographie. Paris: Les impressions nouvelles Lemagny's La Photographie Créative, 1984;Bibliothèque nationale (France), Lemagny, J.-C., Paris (France)., & Mois de la photo (Festival). (1984). La photographie creative: Les collections [de photographies contemporaines] de la Bibliothèque nationale : 15 ans d'enrichissement. Paris: Contrejour Gaston Fernandez Carrera's, La Photographie, le néant, 1986;Fernandez, C. G. (1986). La photographie, le néant: Digressions autour d'une mort occidentale. Paris: Presses universitaires de France Jean-Marie Schaeffer's L'Image Précaire, 1987;Schaeffer, J.-M. (1987). L'image précaire: Du dispositif photographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. and American art critic Rosalind Krauss Le Photographique: pour une théorie des écarts published directly in French (there was no American edition) in 1990,Krauss, R. (1990). Le Photographique. Pour une Théorie des Ecarts. Parijs: Editions Macula ten years after Roland Barthes' seminal book, Camera Lucida.Barthes, R. (1981). La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie. Paris: GallimardDenoyelle, F. (2019). Arles Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Une histoire française. (n.p.): Art Book Magazine Éditions.

History The partners Monterosso and Mayaud entrusted the revue's chief editorship to André Rouillé, a Marxist historian, formally an LCR activist, who produced studies on photographic history during the 1980s. Rouillé wrote L' Empire de la photographie 1839-1870 (1982), a study of photography and capitalism in nineteenth-century France; Le Corps et son Image: Photographies du dix-neuvième siècle (1986) drawing on images from the Bibliothèque Nationale, to look at the body in French photography: the labouring body; law enforcement, medical imagery, and photographs of dead Communards. With Jean-Claude Lemagny he edited Histoire de la photographie Lemagny, J.-C., & Rouillé, A. (1998). Histoire de la photographie. Paris: Larousse. in which he wrote a chapter "The rise of photography (1851-70); Exploring the world by photography in the nineteenth century".

As editor of the journal Rouillé developed some original work, but was increasingly preoccupied with contemporary "creative" photography, before moving away for a few years from the disciplinary field to orient his activity towards electronic media and cultural information.Michel Poivert, "André ROUILLÉ, La Photographie. Between document and contemporary art, Gallimard, coll. Folio essays, 2005, 704 p., 20 ill. NB, Études photographiques [Online], 17 | November 2005

Twenty issues were published, each one devoted to a different theme for which the editorial team conducted peer reviews of the submissions, which at the time represented a unique approach. Among the subjects thus explored were: the links between cinema and photography (1987), war photography (1989), erotic photography (1988), Japanese photography (1990), "the shadow" (1991), Roland Barthes and photography (1992).

Personnel

Editor-in-chief: André Rouillé Editorial director: Dominique Baqué Editorial board: Pierre Bonhomme, Anne Cartier-Bresson, Alain Desvergnes, Catherine Flochlay, André Gunthert, Bernard Marbot and Françoise Reynaud.

Legacy La Recherche photographique was still, in 2018, recommended as a text by the University of Paris 8.

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