We are pleased to announce the release of Études photographiques 27. With article themes ranging from images of war, to photographs in print, to histories in motion, issue 27 features texts by renowned scholars, such as Georges Didi-Huberman and David Campany, and noted PhD candidates, including Rémy Besson and Gérôme Truc. This new issue also features a portfolio of politically charged work by French photographer Mathieu Pernot.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial
Thierry Gervais. ‘The Economics of Research’

Images of War
Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Sampling Chaos: Aby Warburg and the Photographic Atlas of the Great War’

Portfolio
Mathieu Pernot, ‘Migrants’

Photographs in Print
David Campany, ‘Recalcitrant Intervention: Walker Evans’s Pages’

Gérôme Truc, ‘March 11 as a New September 11: The Photographic Coverage of the 2004 Madrid Bombings’

Histories in Motion
Rémy Besson, ‘The Karski Report: A Voice with the Ring of Truth’

Valérie Vignaux, ‘Léon Moussinac and L’Humanité as a Cinematic Force: Militant Cinema and Cultural Activism in the Interwar Years in France’

SUMMARIES
Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Sampling Chaos: Aby Warburg and the Photographic Atlas of the Great War’
This article deals with a particular aspect of the genesis of the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne composed by Aby Warburg between 1927 and 1929. It has to do with his reaction to the events of the Great War, a reaction which is at the same time ‘pathetic’ (even ‘pathological’) and ‘epistemic’ (that is to say methodological). If the history of culture amounts, for Warburg, to a great ‘psychomachia’ of the astra and the monstra, as he said, then it seems evident that the war for him was a direct test of his ‘science of culture’ (Kulturwissenschaft).  It is no surprise that between 1914 and 1918 Warburg created a large iconographic collection of the war whose theoretical foundations I wish here to examine by comparing it with the efforts of his contemporaries in Germany and France (notably in the work of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch).

David Campany, ‘Recalcitrant Intervention: Walker Evans’s Pages’
Between 1945 and 1965 Walker Evans was employed by Time Inc. to work for Fortune, the American business and industry magazine. He advised on its photographic direction and produced his own photo-essays, often setting his own assignments, shooting, editing, designing, and writing too. Evans’s complex politics and artistic temperament were at odds with American magazine culture. Many of his photo-essays resisted Fortune’s preference for business, industry, and modern capitalist progress. Instead he celebrated the outmoded, the disappearing, and the overlooked. His layouts and texts often faced the viewer with the ambiguities of photographs as documents. As well as shooting his own projects he worked with archival and vernacular images such as popular postcards. This essay explores three of Evans’s pieces for Fortune: ‘Labor Anonymous’ (1946), ‘Main Street Looking North from Courthouse Square’ (1948) and ‘Homes for Americans’ (1946). As Evans’s ‘museum’ reputation grew in the 1960s and 1970s, his magazine work was forgotten or dismissed as compromised commercialism. The author revisits those pages to show just how seriously Evans took them.

Gérôme Truc, ‘March 11 as a New September 11: The Photographic Coverage of the 2004 Madrid Bombings’
The Madrid bombings of March 11, 2004, were immediately hailed as a ‘new September 11.’ This article seeks to determine whether this analogy is also pertinent to the photographic coverage of the two events. It is based on the statistical treatment of a sample of 248 photographs that were featured on the day following the attacks on the front pages of newspapers in Spain, the rest of the Europe, and the United States. As in the case of September 11, the entire body of these photographs can ultimately be reduced to six ‘images-types’ or ‘master images’ that were endlessly repeated. But the relative frequency of each of them and the actual photographs most widely reproduced vary from one geographical area to another. This is especially the case for images of the dead and wounded, which were much more visible in Spain than in the United States. This observation then becomes an occasion to identify the effects of globalization on the distribution of news photographs in the United States and Europe, as well as to explore the journalistic practices and types of intericonicity that lead to different ways of photographically representing death.

Mathieu Pernot, ‘Migrants’
Mathieu Pernot lives in Paris. He enrolled in the École Nationale de la Photographie d’Arles (National School of Photography, Arles) in 1993 and, while a student there, began a project involving the Roma families living in the area. He later went on to tackle such issues as social exclusion, incarceration, and the effects of city planning, producing work that fell squarely in the camp of political photography. With an interdisciplinary approach that ranges from the use of archives to that of different production scenarios, Mathieu Pernot explores the various modes of photographic representation. His photographs have been exhibited at many venues, including the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Photographers’ Gallery in London, and Museu Berardo in Lisbon. He is the author of five monographs published by Actes/sud, 779 éditions, and le point du jour.

Rémy Besson, ‘The Karski Report: A Voice with the Ring of Truth’
In 1977 Claude Lanzmann and his film team made contact with the Polish Resistance courier Jan Karski. Late in 1978, after a silence lasting more than thirty years, Karski agreed to be filmed at home for two days. In Shoah (1985), Lanzmann used 39 minutes of the Karski footage; and in 2010 he returned to the original interview for a new film, The Karski Report, shown on the Franco-German channel Arte. Separated by twenty-five years, Shoah and The Karski Report have both been regarded as documentaries in the commonly accepted sense – that is, as films providing the most direct possible access to the words of those speaking. Regarding both films the director stresses his wish to communicate ‘the truth,’ but what he has said about them and the visual choices made in each are very different. It would seem that the communication of the truth he aspires to takes different forms according to the filmmaking context and in more general terms raises the issue of the role of mediation in the making of a ‘documentary’ film.

Valérie Vignaux, ‘Léon Moussinac and L’Humanité as a Cinematic Force: Activist Cinema and Cultural Activism in the Interwar Years in France’
In France between the World Wars, artists and intellectuals reflected on the mission of cinema, and their ideas helped to legitimate the nascent art form not only in aesthetic and cultural terms but socially as well. With his column in the Communist newspaper L’Humanité, Léon Moussinac was certainly one of the most influential figures in this process. So much so, that a close reading of his articles and an examination of his activities and convictions, places in question the accepted view of cinema during this period. By analyzing his writings and his activities within the party’s cultural organizations, this article demonstrates that they were consistently informed by a conception of film as a mass art form. Film is understood as a medium that may be employed to acculturate and educate the great mass of the population, a view which underscores the kinship between activities that are generally considered distinct from one another: militant cinema and cultural activism.

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