Biographie
Dating my interest in photography is practically unanswered. I remember a photo where I look smiling at an enlarger. I was 7 or 8 years old, it was just fun to be photographed. I remember the family-like attitude that each of us exploited, since there was no retardant. I was about fifteen years old then. I remember buying my first serious camera with my first salary. It was the end of the 70s.
At 69 years old, I have practically gone through half a century of the history of photography. Nurtured in humanism, my beginnings focused on technique and the search for the 'beautiful' image were not enough.
Discover history, discover what one can «say» with the photo, do not remain closed to a photograph that one does not understand. In two centuries, photography has crossed many currents, all worthy of interest to understand it and make it understood.
And after!...
I’m still looking...
Présentation
1826 is more or less the date of the first photograph, "Point de vue du Gras à Saint Loup de Varenne" by Nicéphore Nièpce.
With this exhibition, Jean-Michel Verdan revisits the history of photography which will be 200 years old. Two centuries with the significant ideas and images of this 'average art'. Two centuries of punctum, vernacular, conceptual... to arrive at a photograph that is made with words. Two centuries where today the image is omnipresent. In 1931, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy wrote "the illiterate of tomorrow will not be one who ignores writing, but one who ignores photography".