Jean-Claude Lemagny

Jean-Claude Lemagny (24 December, 1931– ) is a French library curator and historian of photography; a specialist in contemporary photography, he has contributed to the world of fine-art photography in several roles.

Biography

Born 24 December 1931 in Versailles, the son of Paul Lemagny and Léonie Leloup, Jean-Claude Lemagny acheived a series of academic landmarks; a License in History and Geography, a Certificate in French Literature, a Certificate in Art of the Middle Ages, a Superior Studies Diploma in the History of Art, and an Aggregation in History, which is a prestigious professional qualification as a teacher. Qualified as an art historian, librarian and curator, in 1963 he was employed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, first cataloguing art books and eighteenth century French engravings. Also a professor at L'Ecole du Louvre, he taught classes on eighteenth century engraving.

In 1968, he was made responsible for the contemporary photography collection, a position he held until 1996 Influential in the recognition of photographic art by heritage institutions, he created 'La Galerie des photographies' in 1971 in the Library's Galerie Colbert. Highlighting contemporary photography and with a regular publication of catalogues he presented solo exhibitions of photographers including Édouard Boubat (1973), Gilles Caron (1978), Garry Winogrand (1980), Christian Milovanoff (1980), Rogi André (1981), François Le Diascorn (1982), Arnaud Claass (1982), Tom Drahos (1984) ), Charles Harbutt (1989), Bruce Gilden (1989), Louis Faurer (1990).

After the death in obscurity, on April 11, 1970, of the Hungarian-born French photographer Rogi André, briefly the first wife of André Kertész, Jean-Claude Lemagny rescued her archives from disaster, and in particular her original prints, which had been put on sale at the Hôtel Drouot, and acquired them for the National Library.

Lemagny also mounted exhibitions from the library's collection on a monthly basis so that it reflected the contemporary evolution of the medium. Over the years he served as photography curator the BNF acquired over 70,000 new photographs. Every ten years, exhibitions of acquisitions were presented, the first being organised in 1971. In total Lemagny presented more than two hundred exhibitions at the National Library and others in sites in Paris and around the world; Eloge de l'Ombre ('in Praise of the Shadow') for example, was presented to the public in 2000-2001 at the Kawasaki Municipal Museum and the Yamaguchi regional Fine Art Museum in Japan.

In 1981, he contributed to the creation of Cahiers de la photographie.

In 1998, Lemagny retired as official curator of photography and was named an Honorary General Curator of the BNF.

Theorist

Articulate and prolific, Lemagny participated in numerous conferences and colloquiums on photography in France and around the world, and published hundreds of articles and several major works on individual photographers, trends and themes in photography. He was invited to curate exhibitions for other institutions or to write accompanying text for their catalogues.

In 1989, Lemagny wrote: "In photography, as in all art, what is of fundamental importance is not finding an idea but exploring matter manifest in forms. It is about sustaining a certain density, from within which creativity can circulate."

The aesthetic clock

In 1977 - and in a revision resumed in 1991 - he proposed a classification of photographs into four main categories selected from a random corpus of 237 photographs taken by the most diverse photographers including William Klein, Robert Frank, Emmanuel Sougez, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Christian Boltanski, Pierre Cordier, Don McCullin, Raoul Hausmann, Helen Sager, Jean-Pierre Sudre, Daniel Masclet, Josef Sudek, and others.

In 1977, this originally took the form of this matrix:

Lemagny's aesthetic matrix, 1977

	The picture as objective material reality	Conceptual photo as a pure idea of ​​itself
The photo as a relationship to the inner world: surrealism	Object	Subject
The photo as a relationship to the outside world: reportage	Form	Ground

Divided and arranged in a circle, he called this grid of reflection on photography his “horloge esthétique” (‘aesthetic clock’):

A representation of Lemagny's horloge esthétique

L'ombre et le temps published in 1992 sets out Lemagny's propositions about photography, to which the book's other contributors respond.

La Matiere, l'Ombre et la Fiction

Lemagny's exhibition and book La Matiere, l'Ombre et la Fiction, ('Matter, Shadow and Fiction') in 1994 which drew on the BNF collection of contemporary photographs, which he organised in panels based on his perceived resonance of one photograph with another rather than with something seen in each. The presentation provoked strong reactions

In 1996, Jean-Francois Chevrier criticized Jean-Claude Lemagny for devoting himself to creative photography while neglecting documentary and informational considerations. The same year, Phillipe Arbaizar wrote of Lemagny's tremendous work and contribution to the world of art photography.

Rencontre Internationale d' Aries

Lemagny supported Lucien Clergue in organising in 1970 the first Rencontre Internationale d' Aries, an international photography festival, to which he was sometimes invited to give an official presentation, though he usually attended in a personal capacity. Bruce McCaig recalls that;

Summer after summer, Lemagny could be found seated at a table often at the Hotel Arlatan, reviewing photogra­ phers' portfolios on a first-come-first-served basis. the line of hopeful artists sometimes stretching for blocks. He would take a break at noon to eat a sandwich and otherwise spent the day looking at and talking about hundreds of photographs.

Bibliography

• Yates, Steven A (1995), Poetics of space a critical photographic anthology (1st ed ed.), Albuquerque University of New Mexico Press, ISBN 978-0-8263-1522-9 {{citation}}: |edition= has extra text (help)
• La Photographie créative, Contrejour, 1984 ; prix Nadar, 1985.
• Histoire de la photographie Jean-Claude Lemagny & André Rouillé (Ed Bordas 1986).
• La Photographie : tendances récentes, CNDP, 1986 ; réédition actualisée : La Photographie : tendances des années 1950-1980, CNDP, 2002.
• Entretien avec Alin Avila, De la forme, in Area revue no 3, page 67 sq., 2002.
• L’Ombre et le Temps. Essais sur la photographie comme art, avec une préface de Gilles Mora, Nathan, 1992 ; réédition, Armand Colin, 2005.
• La Matière, l’Ombre, la Fiction : photographie contemporaine. Récents enrichissements du département des Estampes et de la Photographie, BNF et Nathan, 1994.
• Le marieur d'images, (autour de Christian Milovanoff), Galerie Françoise Paviot, 2012-2013.
• Jean-Claude Lemagny, Silence de la photographie, L'Harmattan, 2013.