Jean-Claude Lemagny

Jean-Claude Lemagny (24 December 1931 – 19 January 2023) was a French library curator and historian of photography; a specialist in contemporary photography, he contributed to the world of fine-art photography in several roles.

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.

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.

In 1968, he was made responsible for the contemporary photography collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a position he held until 1996.

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.

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;

"'Summer after summer, Lemagny could be found seated at a table often at the Hotel Arlatan, reviewing photographers' portfolios on a first-come-first-served basis. the line of hopeful artists sometimes stretching for blocks. He would take a break at noon to eat a sandwich and otherwise spent the day looking at and talking about hundreds of photographs.'"

Influential in the recognition of photographic art by heritage institutions, he created 'La Galerie des photographies' in 1971 in the Library's Galerie Colbert.

Every ten years, exhibitions of acquisitions were presented, the first being organised in 1971.

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).

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."

In 1981, he contributed to the creation of the journal Les Cahiers de la photographie, in which a number of his essays appeared.

In 1989, Lemagny wrote: "'In photography, as in all art, what is of fundamental importance is not finding an idea but exploring matter manifest in forms. It is about sustaining a certain substance, from within which creativity can circulate.'"

L'ombre et le temps published in 1992 sets out Lemagny's propositions about photography, to which the book's other contributors respond.

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;

"“In a world which now coincides the communicable and the immediate utilitarian, a world which even seems to have given up the critical substance of history, art has no more space in which to ferment. [A] radiant technical success resulting from a society which began to make everything permutable and exchangeable, does photography remain, paradoxically, a last small room where art could survive?”"

The presentation provoked strong reactions.

In 1998, Lemagny retired as official curator of photography and was named an Honorary General Curator of the BNF.

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 1999 he meditates on the relation of photographer and collector;

"'We come to think that the first collector is the photographer himself. It could be said, at a pinch, that a painter collects his paintings; but these are too completely the effect of his manual decisions for it to mean much. Whereas a photographer is first of all the one who, in the ocean of visual realities, chooses. By his gestures of choice, he has already initiated his artistic process. ... It follows that the collector of photos who is not himself a photographer is already, almost, a photographer. He shares with them an inaugural and necessary gesture: to choose. Hence the particular weight of the collections during the history of photography. Apart from the simple utility, any photo as part of a collection sees its plastic presence exalted by the proximity of others. The organization of a collection, its trends, its evolution, take part in the dynamics of art. They become almost creative gestures.

And even totally creative, in sum, if we replace them in the broader context of contemporary art.'"

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.