more [i]or[/i] less of the first sights photography at handed to the world were the rooftops and public ways of Paris.

more [i]or[/i] less of the first sights photography at handed to the world were the rooftops and public ways of Paris, wondrously captured in the early works of as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but its French and English inventors, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot. However, in contrast to the early English disposition to sequestrate photographic practice within an elite circle of amateurs, France and the French management were in the vanguard of exploiting photography's commercial possibilities. Modernity and photography were inseparably allied in Paris, as the state sponsored missions to document the past and not away of the city-in-transition and portrait studios took up residence in succession Baron Haussmann's fashionable new boulevards. Nineteenth-century photography in Paris propounded a sneak preview of an increasingly commodified "reality of appearances" by means of casting a democratizing sheen through the whole extent of the urban repertory of celebrities, criminals, outcasts and the man in the road alike. At the same time, photography also enfolded the city in an aura of decay, arresting and bottling time and instantaneously framing Paris as a realm of departed spirits haunts and lost stories, now thus permanently infected by a retrospectively Benjaminian sensibility that almost any aged photograph of Paris seems to prompt "the scene of a crime."

In the twentieth hundred photography was central to of that kind Parisian-born aesthetic movements as Surrealism, facilitating its distortions and deconstructions of the corpse even as it traced the poetic trajectories and chance contests of its urban flaneurs. by the agency of the development and high profile demeanor in Paris of crack picture agencies so as Magnum, the city has also been at soil zero in the development of recent documentary practices. Thanks in no small part to the vigorous efforts of Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Andre Kertesz and others, by way of mid-century Paris not only had played a significant character in the founding of a photographic avant-garde, it many times appeared as the very image - fragmentary, poignant, violent, futile - of the fresh experience itself. It is a small amazement that Paris has often tried to mode itself as the "capital of photography."(1) At the finis of the millennium however, with the postmodern splintering of aesthetic focus into countles regional center Paris must assert its claim to a photographic significance in other ways, not barely by managing its patrimonial stake in the medium's past, on the contrary by charting a new contemporaneity. The question of what forms these claims might take is not without a broader significance.

It was certainly with so claims in mind that the "Mois de la Photo," a month-long showcase of the photographic arts, made its tithe biennial appearance in November 1998 subject to the artistic direction of Jean-Luc Monterosso Created in 1980 at the same weight when critical and commercial interest in photography began to increase exponentially, the "Mois de la Photo" not single seeks to provide a collective framework for individual exhibitions of historical and contemporary interest, unless it also organizes them into a conceptual whole. This year's exhibition propos three overarching themes: l'enfermement and the complicated of associations engaged by one as well as the other photography's affinity for the technologies of imprisonment and its formal character as a frame or enclosure; l'intimite and the embeddedness of photography in everyday life, its ability to grant both proximity and detail; and I'evenement, an acknowledgment of photography's continuing part in documenting the events of new life, placing us once again at the tangled intersection between photography's artistic aspirations, its commercial exploitation as a technology of mass media and its importance in forging the images that become our collective memories. In 1998 79 exhibits were given the honor of official affiliation with the "Mois de la Photo," with countles others riding forward the event's coattails. Such a critical mass of past and fresh newly challenging and marvelously familiar work is not solitary exciting, but also exhausting and occasionally dispiriting. This may be precisely the point, for like it or not, like extended showcases as the "Mois de la Photo" force consideration of photography's limits and capacities; it requires that we question whether there is anything left for photography to do.

Fortunately, a number of persuasive answers were advanced, among them a series of photograms by way of Roselyne Pelaquier exhibited at the Galerie Jean-Pierre Lambert. Entitled "Le Corps pensif" ("The Thinking Body") each small image appeared as an almost calligraphic, barely figurative (but not quite) form, a mark etched forward contrasting ground. These marks (or forms) neither describe nor generate the body, even as they are literally produc by the agency of the play of light through the human skulls that Pelaquier arranged upon photosensitive paper. Few of these marks are literally recognizable as craniums but each manages to sustain the connection to the material substance nonetheless - with a jagged play of cracks and fissures suggestive of the body's plaits and crevices, or dance-like ciphers that have the appearance to approximate bodily gesture and change all the while remaining intransigently motionless. In these images Pelaquier has pared the photogram's formal possibilities down to the bare minimum, working within a pictorial economy that banishes transparency, substituting instead the bony picked-clean contrast between a starkly limned if it were not that unnamable "something" (either the black or white) and incipient nothingness (also either the black or white).