Montpellier (Hérault). “Color photography is what we know the least about Raymond and what he knows the least about in his work”underlined, in 2013, Hervé Chandès during the inauguration of the exhibition “A moment so sweet” that the latter, then director of the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, signed at the Grand Palais. Twelve years after this first monograph devoted to color in the photographer’s work, the Pavillon populaire in Montpellier is offering a new exhibition on this theme for its reopening. As a counterpoint, the Fabre Museum presents, in two rooms dedicated to the donation of the photographer and his wife, Claudine Nougaret, in 2023, 200 prints from the black and white series “Communes”, “Rural” and “His eye in my hand”.
A family police station
It was in the wake of this donation that carte blanche was given to the photographer to create an exhibition in these places. Raymond Depardon explains the choice of Simon Depardon and Marie Perennès for his curatorship, “by the wish not to ramble and release the same photos”. For his son, also a photographer, director and producer, and his daughter-in-law, curator and exhibition curator at the Fondation Cartier, from 2017 to 2024, the choice to focus on color responded to their passion for this work and their wish to “ show how the work of a photojournalist led him to color and much more intimate work. »
Much less exhibition space (360 m2) nevertheless for this rereading compared to those of the Grand Palais but a journey rich in unpublished or little-known photographs and above all clearer in its aim aiming to tell the way in which Depardon’s relationship with color was constructed and its evolution, particularly during his years as a photojournalist first at the Delmas agency, then at Gamma and Magnum. Grouped in two successive rooms, these years reflect a life dedicated to constantly covering current events, whether national or international. Depardon always had two cameras on hand: one with black and white film, the other with color film. Their research in the photographer’s archives, now preserved by the Médiathèque du Patrimoine et de la Photographie, unearths reports whose development tells as much of an era as Depardon’s curiosity and involvement with his subject. “La Ferme du Garret” (1984) engages him in another, more personal relationship with color as prefigured, four years earlier, in his two reports from 1980 on Glasgow (projected in the exhibition).
In the vast central room of the Popular Pavilion, the association of large formats from the new “USA” series begun in 2019, with an anthology of vertical images created during his travels since 2004, forms a very beautiful echo chamber of what catches his eye and testifies to his attraction to color ever since. Namely “its clarity, luminous and joyful, which brought me closer to my childhood”underlines Depardon. In this 60-year journey of color photography, however, the work on France begun at the same time and built in an identical formal continuity is missing.
