“Photographers are a special breed of human being,” Christian Caujolle as soon as mentioned. “Not those who’re producers of photographs however those that are capable of suggest a special standpoint. Those whose perspective isn’t about copy however interpretation, utilizing such a wierd and particular device as images. And at all times with a stress between realism and fantasy.”
The founding father of the influential Agence Vu, who died in Tarbes, France, on 20 October, aged 72, was a seminal determine in French images, and by extension, an immense affect on how the medium is perceived world wide. Beginning out as a critic after which images director at certainly one of France’s main newspapers, then organising Vu as an company and later a gallery, he was a prolific author and curator recognized for his energetic assist of younger expertise, and an unyielding dedication to the assertion of the photographer as an auteur.
“My ardour for images most likely comes from the truth that, after I was a toddler, I had no entry in any respect to visible tradition,” Caujolle as soon as mentioned. “It has fuelled me with curiosity.” He was born in 1953 and grew up on his grandparents’ farm in a small village in south-west France. He studied in close by Toulouse for a yr, the place his encounters with Jean Dieuzaide, the founding father of the Château d’Eau gallery, have been transformative, encountering images as an artwork type.
On the centre of Parisian mental life
On the École Normale Supérieure in Paris he studied trendy literature, grew to become buddies together with his academics Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, and ready a thesis with Pierre Bourdieu. He labored with Foucault after college, together with analysis for Je Suis Pierre Rivière, which was tailored right into a e-book and movie, and began as a journalist at Libération, the leftist newspaper co-founded and initially edited by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1973 within the wake of the 1968 protests. He wrote about artwork and literature, and more and more turned his consideration to images, spending most Saturdays on the gallery of Agathe Gaillard in Paris’s Marais district, the primary gallery in France solely dedicated to the medium. It was right here, within the late Seventies, that he met most of the greats of post-war French images, reminiscent of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Brassaï, in addition to guests from overseas, together with André Kertész, Invoice Brandt and Larry Clark.
He and Hervé Guibert at Le Monde have been an integral a part of a transformative time for images’s recognition and standing in France. “Christian and his friends actually skilled a era to be interested by images,” says François Hébel, a recent of Caujolle finest recognized for his management on the Les Rencontres d’Arles picture competition. Then, in 1981, when Libération was relaunched, he grew to become the director of images, in control of the visible content material of the day by day newspaper.
“He modified the way in which images was utilized in newspapers,” says Hébel. He would fee unknown photographers, and he gave established names stunning assignments. William Klein was despatched to cowl Pope Jean Paul II’s go to to Lourdes in 1980, as a result of Caujolle wished “an irreverent eye”. Raymond Depardon was commissioned to ship an image per day to seem within the newspaper’s overseas affairs pages, accompanied by a diaristic textual content about his temper. Sophie Calle’s The Deal with E book ran as a summer season column. “Many photographers owe their careers to him due to his willingness to take probabilities and his unbelievable eye.”
Agence Vu, which Caujolle described as “photographers’ company, not a photograph company”, emerged as a particular challenge in a small workplace on the newspaper. He left Libération to launch Vu in 1986, difficult the normal information picture company mannequin by enrolling photographers who introduced a extra subjective method. It was enormously influential, however “he wasn’t a pure entrepreneur”, says Hébel, who was the director of Magnum Pictures in Paris throughout roughly the identical interval.
Caujolle was maybe on the top of his affect when he fulfilled a long-held dream to open an exhibition area. Galerie Vu opened in 1997 with Caujolle as its inventive director. He and Vu each grew to become related to an introspective, stream-of-consciousness sort of images exemplified by Antoine d’Agata and Michael Ackerman. “These have been two he actually pushed,” says Hébel. “He additionally supported photographers like Anders Petersen, Denis Darzacq and [many others]. The work grew to become darker, extra introspective. He was at all times forward, sensing what was subsequent… He had a nostril for discovery.”
‘He had religion in instinct’
The Swedish photographer J.H. Engström was one such “discovery”. “When Christian was in Stockholm, I went to satisfy him. I laid out all of the prints for [the photographic diary] Making an attempt to Dance. The entire flooring of the foyer was lined. He checked out them and mentioned, very merely however with nice conviction, ‘This must be exhibited.’ And proper there, on the spot, he proposed an exhibition at Galerie Vu.” What impressed him about Caujolle’s method within the years that adopted that first encounter? “He was an mental, however he went past principle — and only a few folks do this. Idea and mental patterns are like crutches for a lot of on this enterprise… [but] he had religion in instinct.”
Pictures was for him about following what you consider… taking adventures inside your self
Anders Petersen, photographer
Engström’s instructor, Anders Petersen, remembers the same encounter that led him to additionally be part of Vu within the early 2000s, starting a protracted friendship and dealing partnership: “[he] was completely trustworthy, but in addition heat, beneficiant and stuffed with solidarity. You felt a part of his household… Pictures, for him, was about life and following what you consider… Taking adventures inside your self. That’s how he lived too.”
In the identical yr that Galerie Vu opened, Caujolle was the visitor director of Les Rencontres d’Arles, and he repeated the function at smaller picture festivals within the Netherlands, the Basque area and in Sweden, earlier than organising his personal, Phnom Penh Picture, in 2008. Monica Allende, a London-based curator and competition director who took over from him at each GetxoPhoto and Landskrona Foto, says he was a visionary, particularly in how he conceptualised images in public areas. “I noticed his genius up shut. He had this manner of understanding the native tradition and making it central,” she says. “In Phnom Penh, he projected photographs onto boats that drifted alongside the river, turning the town’s day by day life into a part of the exhibition. It was extraordinary, and so considerate, so respectful.”
Caujolle curated numerous small reveals platforming rising photographers, however there have been main exhibitions additionally: the Lithuanian Pavilion on the 2003 Venice Biennale, Gérard Rondeau on the Grand Palais in Paris, and Issues as They Are: Photojournalism in Context Since 1955, which toured globally. All through, he at all times wrote, producing dozens of monographs, prefaces, catalogues and, in 2007, a type of memoir of his encounters with images, titled Circonstances Particulières (Particular circumstances) offered in two volumes by Actes Sud.
In January 2010 he was appointed Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Ten years later, he was appointed inventive adviser at Galerie du Château d’Eau, the place he noticed his first images exhibition 50 years earlier. Then, in 2024, the yr earlier than he misplaced his battle with most cancers, Caujolle was implicated in an accusation of sexual assault within the Nineteen Eighties. Caujolle vigorously denied the allegations and the investigation stays ongoing. In a press release, Les Rencontres d’Arles celebrated Caujolle’s “immense contribution to the world of images”, however acknowledged the accusations by including: “His passing leaves the world of images suspended between emotion, gratitude and questioning.”
Christian Caujolle, born Sissonne, Hauts-de-France, 26 February 1953; director Agence Vu 1986-1998, inventive director Galerie Vu 1998-2007; died Tarbes, 20 October 2025
