Tag: Christian Caujolle

Old Dhaka by Munem Wasif

Belonging: A book by Munem Wasif

Preface by Christian Caujolle

Belonging
It only takes a single glance to recognize a classic. The confirmation can be seen here, in this direct, forthright photography ? the same quality that came through in the series devoted to ?Salty Tears?, in which Munem Wasif examined, documented and questioned the situation regarding water in his country, Bangladesh. Classic by choice, starting with the choice of black and white, whose relative distancing from reality demands exacting precision in the composition. Arising, as always in photography, from a succession of rejections, eliminations and decisions, this choice precludes the picturesque quality that too often prevails when lands and peoples are viewed through the prism of exoticism. But black and white, while it places the photographer within a documentary tradition long associated with journalism, obliges him to go beyond merely transposing a visual record of the world. He must take a position, and he does, deliberately and consistently.

Open salon at the riverbank, Buriganga, 2005.
Open salon at the riverbank, Buriganga, 2005.

Continue reading “Old Dhaka by Munem Wasif”

Space Invader ? Christian Caujolle

Interviewed by Manik Katyal: Emaho Magazine

Emaho caught up with celebrated French curator and photographer Christian Caujolle to see the view from his rarefied space.
Manik: It?s been more than 26 years roughly that you have started your career as a photo editor with Liberation and then you started curating; how has the journey and experience been so far?
Christian: I think that the first thing is that for different reasons the environment of photography and then the content?the aesthetics of photography radically changed. Let?s say that there are two main points which made those changes radical. One is the crisis of media business in printed paper and the second one is the invention of technology with the invention of development and coming of digital image. So the result in one way is a fact that the traditional media are in economic trouble but also may be conceptual trouble. As a consequence on what was the main or more visible area of photography from the 50s-80s, which was information, information with mostly photojournalism and part of documentary. That doesn?t means that photojournalism died, that means it?s no more at its top; that means that documentary photography, I will say in tradition which is an old tradition including from the beginning of 20th century when someone as Sander became more important than before in and after? there are big changes in the perception of photography with the development of the functionality of books, the exhibitions. Continue reading “Space Invader ? Christian Caujolle”