Jean-Claude Lemagny
Jean-Claude Lemagny (born 24 December 1931) is a French library curator and historian of photography; a specialist in contemporary photography, he has contributed to the world of fine-art photography in several roles. Early life and education. Born 24 December 1931 in Versailles, oldest of the three children of Paul Lemagny (a winner of the Prix de Rome) and Léonie Leloup, Jean-Claude Lemagny achieved a series of academic landmarks; a License in History and Geography, a Certificate in French Literature, a Certificate in Art of the Middle Ages, a Superior Studies Diploma in the History  of Art, and an Aggregation in History, which is a prestigious professional qualification as a teacher. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Qualified as an art historian, librarian and curator, in 1963 he was employed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, first cataloguing art books and eighteenth century French engravings. Also a professor at L'Ecole du Louvre, he taught classes on eighteenth century engraving. Curator of photography. In 1968, he was made responsible for the contemporary photography collection, a position he held until 1996 Influential in the recognition of photographic art by heritage institutions, he created 'La Galerie des photographies' in 1971  in the Library's Galerie Colbert. Highlighting contemporary photography and with a regular publication of catalogues he presented solo exhibitions of photographers including Édouard Boubat (1973), Gilles Caron (1978), Garry Winogrand (1980), Christian Milovanoff (1980), Rogi André (1981), François Le Diascorn (1982), Arnaud Claass (1982), Tom Drahos (1984) ), Charles Harbutt (1989), Bruce Gilden (1989), Louis Faurer (1990). After the death in obscurity, on April 11, 1970, of the Hungarian-born French photographer Rogi André, briefly the first wife of André Kertész, Jean-Claude Lemagny rescued her archives from disaster, and in particular her original prints, which had been put on  sale at the Hôtel Drouot, and acquired them for the National Library. Lemagny also mounted exhibitions from the library's collection on a monthly basis so that it reflected the contemporary evolution of the medium. Over the years he served as photography curator the BNF acquired over 70,000 new photographs. Every ten years, exhibitions of acquisitions were presented, the first being organised in 1971. In total Lemagny presented more than two hundred exhibitions at the National Library and others in sites in Paris and around the world; "Eloge de l'Ombre" ('in Praise of the Shadow') for example, was presented to  the public in 2000-2001 at the Kawasaki Municipal Museum and the Yamaguchi regional Fine Art Museum in Japan. In 1981, he contributed to the creation of the journal "Les Cahiers de la photographie", in which a number of his essays appeared. In 1998, Lemagny retired as official curator of photography and was named an Honorary General Curator of the BNF. Theorist. Articulate and prolific, Lemagny participated in numerous conferences and colloquiums on photography in France and around the world, and published hundreds of articles and several major works on individual photographers, trends and themes in photography. He was invited  to curate exhibitions for other institutions or to write accompanying text for their catalogues. In 1989, Lemagny wrote: In 1999 he meditates on the relation of photographer and collector; The aesthetic clock. In 1977 - and in a revision resumed in 1991 - he proposed a classification of photographs into four main categories selected from a random corpus of 237 photographs taken by the most diverse photographers including William Klein, Robert Frank, Emmanuel Sougez, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Christian Boltanski, Pierre Cordier, Don McCullin, Raoul Hausmann, Helen Sager, Jean-Pierre Sudre, Daniel Masclet, Josef Sudek, and others. In 1977, this originally took the  form of this matrix: Divided and arranged in a circle, he called this grid of reflection on photography his “horloge esthétique” (‘aesthetic clock’): "For convenience, I suggest that you designate the different points of the circle as on a clock face: 12 o'clock at the top, 6 o'clock at the bottom, 3 o'clock on the right, 9 o'clock on the left, etc...I had distributed around a circle 237 extremely diverse slides, without any a priori, taking into account only the visual connections which spontaneously established between them." "L'ombre et le temps" published in 1992 sets out Lemagny's propositions  about photography, to which the book's other contributors respond. Section::::"La Matiere, l'Ombre et la Fiction". Lemagny's exhibition and book "La Matiere, l'Ombre et la Fiction", ('Matter, Shadow and Fiction') in 1994 which drew on the BNF collection of contemporary photographs, which he organised in panels based on his perceived resonance of one photograph with another rather than with something seen in each. His argument in the text, supported by examples from the BnF collection, proceeds from the question; The presentation provoked strong reactions Rencontre Internationale d'Arles. Lemagny supported Lucien Clergue in organising in 1970 the first Rencontre Internationale  d'Arles, an international photography festival, to which he was sometimes invited to give an official presentation, though he usually attended in a personal capacity. Bruce McCaig recalls that;