Based on academic research, the exhibition currently on display at the Jeu de Paume has the particular merit of attempting to explore issues relating to cultural history, a little-known discipline that has been the subject of few exhibitions to date. However, cultural analysis accords images a major, if not decisive, role in the “social history of representations” that is the horizon of its field of study, as defined by historian Pascal Ory [1]. Cultural history thus examines the circulation of representative objects, particularly images, in the public sphere. Drawing on the three functions of production, mediation, and reception, it seeks to understand the social dynamics that govern the anchoring of representations in a given society.

Reflecting a similar concern, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, for example, has for several years been accompanying its exhibitions devoted to photographers with their press cards, layout mock-ups, and publications, which serve to shed light on the technical, economic, and political context in which the images are produced and received [2]. Rather than these often very comprehensive monographic perspectives, as evidenced by the recent exhibition on the interwar newspaper VU [3], the curators of “L'Evénement” have opted for a transhistorical vision focusing on the general question of the media construction of a historical event. They present the media that have influenced the historical consciousness of an event through five examples: the Crimean War, the conquest of the skies during the Belle Epoque, September 11, 2001, paid vacations, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Each section uses the research methods outlined above, including sampling different media that report on the event, with an emphasis on the dominant technique of the time. The Crimean War thus gives prominence to photography, which was still an experimental technique at the time, while also highlighting drawings and engravings, which continued to be the main medium of representation in the press during the Second Empire. Based on this model, each section is structured around the same framework, combining primary sources of representation—such as original photographs—with their treatment in the media and a work of art intended to reflect the event's impact in the aesthetic sphere. First of all, in relation to this common layout, the exhibition certainly lacks a more consistent focus on the question of the reception and impact of events, although this type of historical data is difficult to display—except perhaps in the section devoted to September 11, where the accumulation of American newspaper front pages plays an almost statistical role. We would therefore like to know more precisely the contours of the audience affected by the events studied—newspaper circulation, the social and political environment of the publications, etc.

As for the objects used for mediation—newspapers, movie theaters, televisions, etc.—which are concrete historical “material,” they occupy an important place in cultural practices and the perception of an event. While newspapers, especially originals, have a prominent place in the exhibition, audiovisual information is treated outside of any contextualization of the material medium. This is the case with the plasma screen, which is very different from a television window when it comes to viewing images of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and whose use becomes comically anachronistic when it is used to show a newsreel report on paid holidays between the two world wars.

Works of art play a minor role here, in line with the epistemological principles of cultural history, which gives mass distribution priority over the confidential production of artistic avant-gardes. The curators thus reflect the primacy given by culturalists to “reflection-representation”—fashion, which is considered the hegemonic representation—as being more directly useful in understanding a collective phenomenon than “rupture-representation.” It is therefore regrettable that the way in which the works of art are presented in each section of the exhibition limits them to an illustrative function. At best, the painting depicting a battalion in the Crimean War serves as evidence of an academic art form that was ultimately rather behind the times. But when it comes to avant-garde paintings such as Delaunay's small painting in the section on the conquest of the air and Fernand Léger's painting on paid leave, the work is confined to the role of visual collateral. “Progress also comes through form!” these two paintings seem to say, lost amid newspaper clippings whose layout itself is a revolution in vision.

Garance Chabert & Aurélien Mole