The Topographic Imaginary: Attending to Place in Contemporary French Photography

Niépce’s iconic View from the Window at Le Gras (1826); the Heliographic Mission of 1851, the multiply authored documentation of the Hausmannian reshaping of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s; the famous DATAR project aiming to represent French territory in the 1980s along artistic as well as scientific lines: In spite of these watershed moments and examples, landscape photography has only recently become a hegemonic genre in France. The reason for the new or renewed interest in this type of image is perfectly summarized in the keywords—“attending” and “topographic”—of the title and subtitle of this exciting study, itself the continuation of a previous volume, France in Flux: Space, Territory Contemporary Culture, coedited by Ari J. Blatt and Edward Welch in 2017. The most far-reaching term is certainly “attending,” not to be confused with some of its purely visual synonyms like “looking” or “viewing.” It supposes new forms of attention,...