[Summer 2023]

By Jill Glessing

Olga Smith
Louvain, Leuven University Press, 2022, 230 pages

[Excerpt]

France, as a birthplace of photography, dominated surveys of the medium until the early twentieth century. It lost its primacy when the centre of the art world crossed the Atlantic, after the Second World War. Since then, international hegemony has dictated that surveys of photography feature primarily US artists and pay little attention to that produced elsewhere, including France. Part of the problem is linguistic. Surveys of contemporary French photography do exist, but because they’re written in French, their international circulation is limited. Confronting this absence is Olga Smith’s recently published monograph Contemporary Photography in France: Between Theory and Practice. As a self-described “foreigner” (étrangère) – the project began as her Cambridge University PhD dissertation – Smith writes from the outside, in English, thereby opening the terrain of French photography for Anglophone audiences…

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY ]
[ Complete article, in digital version, available here: Olga Smith, Contemporary Photography in France: Between Theory and Practice — Jill Glessing ]