The photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) is best known for his sepia-toned photographs of the North American Indians at a time when their culture was tending to disappear under the pressure of Western civilisation spreading westwards. These documentary images are precious testimonies to indigenous traditions, and Curtis deserves credit for showing an early interest in these cultures, which were seen as problems to be solved (in the form of extermination or confinement to reserves) rather than as ethnological subjects. Yet it is clear that many of these images are staged productions, in which the spectacular takes precedence over scientific accuracy, in order to represent the Indian in an idealised form that harks back to a time before the colonisation of America. This ambiguous position, halfway between the desire for scientific objectivity and the staging of an event, could make Curtis a kind of tutelary figure of exhibition photography.

It is generally accepted that photographs of exhibition views are documents. It records a temporary presentation of works of art, documents or objects in such a way as to render the relationships between these elements as unambiguously as possible. However, it is interesting to study how the ‘objectivity’ of these exhibition images is influenced by their intended audience, and whether, in Curtis's case, the fact that it was the banker J.P. Morgan who funded the entire photographic campaign had an effect on the form of these images? It was necessary to respond to the philanthropic ambitions of the client as well as his artistic tastes. It was also necessary to exalt a certain American state of mind. Far from questioning Curtis's independence of spirit, his project having begun before his meeting with J.P. Morgan, it would be appropriate to imagine the people he was thinking about as he produced his images. Was it George Bird Grinnel, the Amerindian specialist whose meeting had profoundly influenced Curtis's interest in this culture on the verge of extinction? Was it the Indians he photographed in order to preserve even a glimpse of them? Was it J.P. Morgan? Each of Curtis's images can be perceived differently, depending on whether we imagine it was intended for one or other of these people.

In the same way, we can ask ourselves who the photographer is addressing when he makes the images for an exhibition, and how this influences the way he does it. To answer this question, ‘The Galapagos Principle’, which is presented as a programme of exhibitions and events taking place at the Palais de Tokyo during the ‘Nouvelles vagues’ meta-exhibition, can be seen as a textbook case.

If, as Marcel Duchamp said, it is the viewers who make the paintings, then it is the visitors who make the exhibitions. In its fragmented form, ‘The Galapagos Principle’ is aimed at an emancipated, available and cultivated spectator who is capable of freeing himself to attend all the moments of this exhibition and to weave links between them. Of course, there is no such thing as the dream viewer to whom every exhibition curator speaks. At least, it doesn't exist outside the curator himself, who will attend the various phases of the project he has designed in order to orchestrate them. This ideal spectator could therefore be imagined as an inverted reflection of the curator. The former's desire to organise would be matched by the latter's desire to decipher.

To compensate for the absence of this perfect visitor, the curators or the institution commission another person to document the various phases of the project as best they can. This documentation will eventually produce a catalogued account of the exhibition that anyone who has not had the opportunity to see the whole project can consult to fill in the gaps. This third character shares with the ideal spectator the desire to decipher the organisation put in place by the exhibition curator, but adds to this desire the technical skills that enable him to record the different states of the exhibition with complete objectivity, leaving nothing out of the picture.

This ideal of objectivity is the first clue to the fictional nature of this character's operations. As the art historian Remi Parcollet has shown in a series of interviews with exhibition photographers, there is always an element of subjectivity in the way the operator documents the exhibition. What's more, one of the photographer's tasks is to make the most of his subject, even if it means taking a few liberties with reality through framing, focal lengths, lighting and, of course, digital retouching. In the end, the exhibition photographed must be what it should objectively be in the minds of those who receive it. Taking set theory as a basis, the place where this objectivity would unfold with its maximum intensity would be the intersection of four circles representing the artist, the curator of the exhibition, the institution in which the exhibition takes place and the press that is supposed to relay its message. It is to these four circles that the exhibition photographer addresses himself, even if he secretly adds a fifth addressee - the art historian who, in the more or less distant future, will use these documents to construct history. By anticipating the expectations of these five categories, the exhibition photographer produces three types of document: image-advertisements, image-speeches and image-transactions. The ideal photograph cuts across these three types of image.

Image-advertisements In the order of priorities, the press is often the first to be served. In absolute terms, the images should already be available when the critic or journalist - another key figure - discovers the exhibition. The choice they are offered is often linked to the photogenic quality of the works. The impact of the image is supposed to encourage visitors to flock to the exhibition, convinced by the article and its illustrations. The view of the work or installation is often preferred to the view of the exhibition, where the distant viewpoint provides little information about the works on display. Christian Waldvogel's project will have a better chance of being presented to the media because it offers itself to contemplation with a certain frontality and presents different elements that all point towards a single goal: that of creating a pinhole of the sun rendered immobile by travelling in a supersonic jet across the surface of the globe in reverse to its movement. The screen showing the horizon tilted ninety degrees, the hole in the cockpit window, the image of the pilot under the red light and the final pinhole are all clues that allow us to reconstruct the progress of the project. We might say that this is an obtuse exhibition in which the various elements are all oriented in the same way.

This is in contrast to Uriel Orlow's installation, which is obtuse: the elements that make it up, while anchored in the geographical reality of the Suez Canal, bring together different anecdotes scattered over time, and the project is expanding. For communication reasons, it is always the obtuse exhibitions that are preferred to the obvious ones. It is very difficult for the photographer to fight against this state of affairs and to use photography to transform an obsolete exhibition into an obtuse one. At most, they can take an interest in the photogenic qualities of certain details of these exposures. He can then produce an attractive composition which, although it says nothing about the complexity of the subject, can compete with the other images in the publications in which it appears. In a way, these images are the show's loss leaders. Of course, to obtain visuals of the exhibition at the opening, the photographs have to have been taken beforehand. This often means during the last few days of installation. As a result, the space to be photographed is a long way from what the exhibition will look like when it opens. The lighting is sometimes approximate, and the points of view are often defined by the tools and the people using them, who have to be left out of the picture. It is up to the photographer to create the illusion of an exhibition, just as the press photographer sometimes creates the illusion of an event.

Image-speeches Through the press, it is the figure of the critic rather than that of the journalist that is targeted. Ideally, these images will be used as a support for the critical activity: a way of looking at the exhibition again in order to freeze the memory. It is on this memory, reorganised and consolidated by the press pack, that the text on the exhibition will be based. From this point of view, the images are documents among others (press release, catalogue, etc.). They are linked to these other elements to explain as precisely as possible the issues and perspectives at the crossroads of which the exhibition is situated. In their relationship to the text, images can be used as illustrations or as demonstrations. If the article has the option of including several images, the sequence of images forms a narrative parallel to that conveyed by the text, and it is interesting to ask how many images are needed to tell the story of a project? For example, Maxime Bondu's project, a cartographic atlas documenting the space covered by the base on which the work stands at the scale of a micron, requires at least two images. An image of the base supporting the book and a detail of its pages.

Laurent Montaron's project, which offers another unfinished version of René Daumal's Mont Analogue in the form of a book page, requires only one image, since narration and documentation overlap exactly in the object itself. Gaël Grivet's Indes Noires, another project linked to words, requires as many images as the objects presented in order to convey the complexity of the links forged between encyclopaedic definitions and the objects that embody them. This image/report ratio is always present in the photographer's mind, allowing him to situate his practice halfway between the lacunar and the confused. If in an article, words can fill in the gaps left between two images, at the moment of shooting, the photographer thinks only in images. Through his criticism, the photographer also targets the historian and his teleological vision of images. The historian is ultimately the person most interested in all the documents. He or she will be able to assess the different points of view on the documents and show how the photographer constructs his or her account of the exhibition in images, from which the critic can also produce his or her own analysis.

Images-transactions But long before him, the artist and the curator were impatient to obtain images. For them, the image is a precious document that they will use to bear witness to their practice. Of course, the artist will be more interested in the photogenic quality of his work, while the curator will primarily observe the two-dimensional rendering of the relationships he has established between the pieces. Both will be interested in the encounter between the work and the institution that takes place through the document. As part of the symbolic exchanges that precede the exhibition, the document attests to this transaction in which the reputation of the most prestigious element (whether artist, curator or institution) reflects on those whose recognition is lesser. For this reason, the photographer must take care to highlight the architecture of the place in which the work or the exhibition takes place. This implicit expectation links the architectural view to the exhibition view. To do this, the conventions of the architectural view require the photographer to work according to a certain orthogonality. This organisation of space, which preserves the horizontal and vertical lines in the image, offers the clearest perspectives. The next step is to remove trivial details such as emergency exit signs or fire extinguishers, while taking care not to completely transform the space into an impersonal white cube, which is now possible with any retouching software. The characteristics of the site are important because they allow us to reconstitute the volumes of the exhibition space and to make the suture between the fields and the counter-fields.

In the context of the ‘Principe Galápagos’, these images-transactions take on a savoury twist since, in addition to the building, it is the institution itself that is represented in the person of its director, Mr Jean de Loisy, holding his title of honorary citizen of the Principality of Sealand. Here, the interplay of symbolic exchanges is placed in abyme, to the point of raising doubts about the ins and outs of the transaction recorded by the photograph. Another specific feature of the project is that almost the entire building is used. The difficulty then lies in being able to produce unity from occurrences dispersed in time and space. Unlike a view of a show, which benefits from the unity of place provided by the stage/room pairing, where the photographer is always facing the stage, ‘Le Principe Galápagos’ has taken pains to ensure that the same frontal relationship is never maintained with the sets and performers. What's more, by inviting works that are themselves made up of narratives, the curators have condemned the photographer to capturing only the surface. As a result, the documents produced for these exhibitions are inadequate from the outset. They evoke the photogram of a film which, in isolation, says nothing about its totality. Between the announcement, made up of A4 sheets laid out on the black basement wall, and the flags of Sealand flying from the pediment of the palace, there is a gap that cannot be bridged by a simple photographic record alone.

Text published in the catalog of the exhibition “Le principe Galapagos”, organized at the Palais de Tokyo during the “Nouvelles Vagues” season by curators Maxime Bondu, Gaël Grivet, Bénédicte Le Pimpec and Émile Ouroumov.

In the final analysis, the definitions of these different types of documents, i.e. advertising images/speeches/transactions, are quite broad, since the expectations of the people for whom they are intended are above all theoretical. The photographer can only imagine what is expected of his or her work, over and above the precise orders given. But it's because he partly imagines these demands that his documentary work is no longer entirely documentary. He slowly slips into a work of fiction, in which the various recipients of these images come to talk to each other. It's the conversations of this iconophile areopagus that never cease to fill the operator's mind as he presses the shutter release on his camera. And if these exchanges were to merge into a single thought, wouldn't it be that of the ideal viewer mentioned above? This “North American Indian”, of whom all the exhibition catalogs published to date could constitute a form of portrait.