A Self Portrait of the XXth Century

A unique, bilingual (French/English) limited edition of 500 copies, co-published by Innocences and L'éditeur du dimanche.
The 20 first copies will be signed and numbered. (SOLD !)

This book gathers around sixty photo series made up of more than 500 anonymous vernacular photographs. This photographic corpus is built by collector Jean-Marie Donat around of idea of giving a peculiar vision of the 20th century.

This book has been published on the occasion of the exhibitionA Self Portrait of the XXth Century - From the J.M. Donat Collection of Vernacular Photography at FOTOFESTIWAL 2020 - International Festival of Photography in Lodz Poland.

"Jean-Marie Donat is a typologist of the snapshot, infused with the vigor of an eighteenth-century encyclopedist venturing into unknown territory, determined to catalog its bewildering profusion of languages or religions or species of click beetle. By now dozens if not hundreds of collections of snapshots have been published by others, some fascinating and some apparently haphazard, but all of them resting uneasily on the premise of their collectors' subjective scale of values. […] What they all have in common is that they represent photographic phenomena that recur, not in the literature but in those bins, tubs, crates of the postmortem economy. […] The great range of topics, procedures, effects, conventions, and experiences to which he is alert causes him to slice through the whole century of popular everyday photographic practice, revealing a cross-section teeming with life. All of these photos are vigorous, despite being several times removed from the life of their conception, and their vigor will not allow a dry, logical order to be imposed on them. And once they have been united under the sign of their common pattern they are many times stronger than they would be in isolation. […] Cumulatively, they demonstrate that popular photography is a cluster of ritualistic practices, generally transparent in their sociological and psychological meaning, to which their photographers and subjects submit as if they had always existed."

Extracts from the preface by Luc Sante.

Contributors
Marie José Mondzain is a philosopher, Emeritus director of research at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS); Director of research for the Political and moral sociology group at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).
Luc Sante is a writer, literary critic and essayist for the New York Review of Books and the New York Times; Photography Professor at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.
Richard Vine is an art critic and managing editor for Art in America, where he frequently writes on contempory art and ideas.
Léo de Boisgisson is a lecturer, guide, journalist, author.

TECHNICAL CHARACTERISTICS

Format: 23 x 28.7 cm
Number of pages: 304 pages
Paper: Gardapat Kiara 150 gsm (1,3)
Cover: semi-rigid cover, overlaid with four-color printed IMPERIAL linen.
Printed and bound in Europe.
Price: 56 euros
BOOK RELEASE: April 20, 2020
BOOK SHIPPING FROM: September 28, 2020