Photographie – Arme de classe

This is an exciting synthesis of a little-known part of the history of French photography in the period between the two world wars. It brings together the unpublished works of great, then still young artists such as Jacques-André Boiffard, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gisèle Freund, Germaine Krull, Eli Lotar, Lisette Model, Willy Ronis and René Zuber, as well as anonymous photographers. The professionals of the Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires (AEAR) and the Amateurs photographes ouvriers (APO), who were committed to the anti-fascist struggle, social revolution and pacifism, used photography as a weapon to document and denounce social realities in France and the world. These new practices gave rise to a visual and graphic grammar at the service of the political struggle, which was fuelled by an enormous dynamism of magazines, brochures, leaflets, posters, etc. An abundance that is reminiscent of the current upsurge in the militant use of shared images on the Internet.