Marie Robert

1. Taous R. Dahmani: Where does your interest in photography come from? Can you tell me about your first enthusiastic reaction to a photographic work?

Marie Robert: 

Your question is surprising, I have never asked myself that question or at least not in those terms: it would be dishonest to say that I remember having had an emotional shock at a precise moment in my life when I was looking at a photograph. In the end, perhaps like many people, my link to the photographic image is above all old, emotional and sensitive. They are memories linked to my grandmother: thinking back to the photo albums we used to look at together, as well as the 8mm and Super 8mm home movies she used to project in the family living room: in these sessions joyful family narrative of memory was constructed collectively. Afterwards, I was asked by my grandmother to take this family memory and to continue to pass it on. I believe that photography is essentially something that has to do with death, with the disappearance of loved ones. It is, in the end, what we have left once they are gone. It is the trace, the imprint of those who are no longer there or who, once photographed, are already dying. I think that I am deeply responsive to the Barthesian reflection on the "it has been" of photography (and cinema). And perhaps that's also why I'm so happy to work in a museum like Orsay, where vintage and heritage photography is preserved, because I love the responsibility of having to continue to bring to life all the dead in our storerooms, all those anonymous people who once had a name. Some decisive experiences with images took place in my early days at the Orsay Museum, notably with the discovery of the "domestic" photographs made by Nabis painter-photographers, such as Pierre Bonnard or Maurice Denis, who captured their nephews’ zest for life or the tender gestures of their wives. At that time I experienced a small epiphany. I said to myself: these snapshots are obviously related to both death and love. Maurice Denis began to practice photography after the death of his first child, as if there had been a pressing urgency for him to photograph those who would be born after his eldest child and thus keep track of the ephemeral. I am also thinking of the Polaroid series of window still lives, made by André Kertész after the death of his wife. 

2. Taous R. Dahmani: Your book A World History of Women Photographers, which will be published this autumn, follows a history of photography seen through the prism of gender. In the 1970s, inspired by the women's liberation movement and second-wave feminist considerations, American author Anne Tucker published The Woman's Eye. This publication was, to my knowledge, the first major attempt to bring together notable photographs by women. Subsequently, in 1994, Naomi Rosenblum’s History of Women Photographers, became a seminal work. As an effect of the work of their predecessors, books focusing on women photographers have been experiencing a renewed interest since the early 2010s. Recently, in 2017, Claire Raymond published Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics. In France, in 2015, Ulrich Pohlmann, Thomas Galifot and yourself organised the exhibition Who’s Afraid of Women Photographers? whose catalogue quickly became a must read. In England, in 2019, The Lightbox, displayed the long-awaited show entitled Women in Photography: A History of British Trailblazers. Can we say that your work is part of this heritage? How did the project for the publication A World History of Women Photographers (Textuel, 2020) come about and what are its goals and hopes?

Marie Robert: 

The introduction to the book looks back at the last 40 years of research. Our intention is not to suggest that we have made theoretical discoveries or that we are revolutionising the history of photography from top to bottom. Of course, there have been many people who have reflected on the contribution of women to the history of photography and it is very important to remember this. These questions — the writing of the history of photography through gender — were first and foremost taken up in the Anglo-American world, then in Germany and also in some Eastern European countries, such as Hungary or Poland. There have been collectives, pioneering researchers — especially women — who have asked themselves these questions before us, French historians. I am also thinking of the more recent work of the Austrian Gabriele Schor, and in particular of her exhibition Feminist Avant-Garde: Art of the 1970s in the Sammlung Verbund Collection, Vienna. This exhibition has travelled a lot in Europe in the last 10 years: it's revealing to note that it has never been shown in France! As a result, in this book we have tried to bear witness to this vast area of research and commitment which preceded us, but of which we were ignorant for a long time, because if the works are not published in French or if they are not easily accessible in libraries, then there is necessarily a period of latency between the moment of the research, that of its dissemination and that of its acculturation in people’s minds. We also wanted to decompartmentalise the cultural spheres. We wanted to invite figures from the world of photography in South America, Asia or sub-Saharan Africa, where the output is very significant as this book testifies. This book and all similar initiatives around the world are rethinking global histories, which have too often had the limited ambition of describing the world from a Western-centric perspective. They show that research is more dynamic than ever, that work is increasingly available and that it is always better to think together, even through contradiction and debates.