La bascule du regard — Des artisans de la Nouvelle Vision

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Les Douches la Galerie and Eric Rémy present La bascule du regard [The Turning Gaze], bringing together the works of Pierre Boucher, Jean Moral and André Steiner. Growing out of the Bauhaus, the artisans of the New Vision represent a generation of experimental photography in the 1920s, borne along by the technical promises of industrial society. By disturbing points of view through games of scale, dizzying diagonal lines and compositions that border on the abstract, the New Vision multiplies the possibilities of photography and decisively turns its gaze toward the future.

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“The years 1927-1928 signal a modern turning point in France for French photography. In late 1927 in Paris, Germaine Krull published her book Métal which became one of the key works for the New Vision. As René Zuber (1902-1979) recalls with regard to the emblematic work, ’Twenty years ago, pointing her camera at the sky, Germaine Krull photographed the Eiffel Tower from the bottom up, and the Eiffel Tower fell on its face… From that day onwards, photographers went off to discover the world…”1 Looking at the world differently, gathering and bringing together the elements of a new visual grammar where the new (as well as the old) is perceived in a new light. That is the impetus of a new generation.

Modern photographers do not adopt the perspective of New Photography, they become the vectors of this new look at the world… They are all between twenty and thirty-five years old; in a certain sense, they find themselves decision-makers, and bereft (delivered also) of reference points, for their elders either disappeared in the first war or have abandoned their activity. Moreover, they have serious reasons for wanting to change the world. Thus for them any kind of innovation is fair game; it is the result of their desires and the mark of their access to the world of creation.

In the early 1920s, photography’s good fortune was to open a breach in the larger public, while also becoming an indispensable means of information for the media that was being created in its modern form. For them, the camera is no longer a tool for recording but for discovering."

Christian Bouqueret in Jean Moral, L’œil capteur, Marval, 1999, p. 8