Avant l'avant-garde

Butterfly woman or crocodile with a moustache, living statues, improbable Siamese twins, shadow puppets, ghosts and ghostly figures, portraits in the nose…
They are very strange creatures that populate the photographs of amateurs in the late nineteenth century. At that time, entire books proposed to the Sunday operators to have fun with photography. Under the name of “photographic recreations”, they offered a whole range of little tricks that went from the simple overprint to the most refined photomontage, and allowed amateurs to create images that were as disturbing as they were hilarious. The effect is guaranteed and the success is guaranteed. At the beginning of the 20th century, this playful imagery became part of the visual imagination of the general public: it invaded the cinematograph, the illustrated press, the postcard and fairground photography. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, recreation entered a new field: that of art.

Artists as important as Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, André Kertész, Berenice Abbott, Claude Cahun, or Henri Cartier-Bresson seized upon these recreational techniques to transform them into resolutely creative proposals. In this fascinating book, Clément Chéroux traces the fascinating history of play in photography over nearly half a century. The result of nearly twenty years of research, this innovative book reveals a little-known part of the history of photography. Accompanied by a surprising iconography of nearly 300 images, it contributes to rewriting an important page in the history of Modernism.