• 1 "Le monde selon l'AI", Jeu de Paume exhibition, Paris, 11 April-21 September 2025; "Photographies e (...)

Current events linked to artificial intelligence1, whose intervention in the field of art seems likely to follow on from the history of photography, today redirect our gaze to 1839 and the announcement of the invention of the daguerreotype as the immediately preceding step in questioning the role of the machine in the process of creating images. At a time when we are just beginning to glimpse the way in which new machine learning tools based on photographic and photo-realistic models stored in data centres are going to change our relationship with images, we immediately see the question of a change of theoretical regime, with the very idea of the 'capture' and recording inherent in the photographic system being abandoned in favor of the “generation” of images from pre-existing models. Even more than the digital turn in photography in the early 2000s, it is this paradigm shift that now seems to be at the root of a reactivation of discursive production about the interactions between the machine and images, as a new echo of our understanding of the history of photography.

• 2 On this subject, see in particular: Steffen Siegel (ed.), 1839. Daguerre, Talbot and the publicatio (...)
• 3 See Paul-Louis Roubert (ed.), Charles Baudelaire, "Le public moderne et la photographie", Études ph (...)

But if the latter produces a model, or let us say, a framework, it is also in the development, from its public origins, of a photographic critique: historiographically speaking, the critical discourse associated with art criticism was an essential vehicle for understanding the photographic revolution and the production of images in the modern era2. It is no exaggeration to say that photographic production and the production of its critical discourse are exactly contemporaneous. Alongside the judgement of forms and works, the development of photographic criticism, as an intermediary between photography and its public, has underpinned much of the history of the reception of the photographic image since its invention, and is therefore, like the critical fortune of Charles Baudelaire's opinion in 18593, an integral part of the history of the medium.

• 4 See among others: Vicki Goldberg (ed.), Photography in Print. Writings from 1816 to the Present, Al (...)
• 5 Jürgen Habermas, L'espace public. Archéologie de la publicité comme dimension constitutive de la so (...)
• 6 See: Thomas Crow, La Peinture et son public à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, Paris : Macula, 2000 (1985), (...)

The number of anthologies published in France, Germany and the United States4 to mark the 150th anniversary of the invention of photography shows that, alongside images, the critical discourse that follows technical, practical, scientific and artistic developments, and that is disseminated in photographic magazines, the artistic and scientific press and the general press, has its own history and, in these fields, builds the history of the evolution of its understanding and uses. It sketches out a theory of the photographic image that is formalised empirically and as if by default, following its dispersal. This historiography, in turn, is part of a modern political reflection on opinion and public spaces5 and, following the pioneering studies of Lionello Venturi, is part of the renewal of studies on art criticism that will influence a history of reception that marks the 1980s-1990s6, but which is slow, overall, to integrate the photographic field into this opening up around the question of the new spaces of art in the nineteenth century.

• 7 Hervé Guibert, La photo inéluctablement, Paris: Gallimard, 1999.
• 8 See Richard Bolton (ed.), The Contest of Meaning. Critical Histories of Photography, Cambridge: MIT (...)

At the same time, from the last third of the twentieth century onwards, photographic criticism – exemplified in France by Hervé Guibert's articles in the newspaper Le Monde7– was supported by a critical discourse on photography emanating from a renewal of the theoretical field organised around post-modern theories of art and the media: Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Rosalind Krauss, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Christopher Phillips, Douglas Crimp, Jonathan Crary, John Tagg, Wolfgang Kemp and Philippe Dubois all used the history of photography itself as a basis for critical thinking that questioned not only the transparency of the medium through the notion of the index, but also its authority and its theoretical implications in the field of representation8.

• 9 See in particular the collections: Jeff Wall, Essais et entretiens 1984-2001, Paris: ENSBA, 2001; A (...)
• 10 See : Katia Schneller, "Sur les traces de Rosalind Krauss", Études photographiques, n°21, December (...)
• 11 While Benjamin's essays, in particular "L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproductibilité technique", (...)

Spurred on by the work of contemporary artists such as Allan Sekula and Jeff Wall, who are taking hold of the medium as object and subject9, photography is moving beyond its autonomous disciplinary field to inform a way of thinking about art that claims to be 'photographic' to use the title of Rosalind Krauss's work coined by Jean-Pierre Criqui10. Photographic thought is becoming normalized, feeding a critical and political perspective that draws on Walter Benjamin's rediscovered reflections on photography11. Thus, while a discipline such as art history and its canons may have played a central role in formalising photographic discourse, critics such as Abigail Solomon-Godeau advocate a multidisciplinary approach that calls into question the very framework within which photographic images are analysed.

• 12 See James Elkins (ed.), Photography Theory, New York / London: Routledge, 2007; Études photographiq (...)

Yet this history seems to come to a halt on the threshold of the massive development of digital technology, provoking a kind of critical paralysis in the field, which then shifts towards the idea of a theoretical thought that questions the constitution of photography as image12. But what is really happening to photographic criticism today? In response to the question of where photographic criticism stands today, we would like to look at the historiography of photographic criticism: what makes people write about the photographic image today as they did in the past? After the major monographs and anthologies, what is the state of research into photographic criticism as a discursive field? Who are the authors who need to be (re)discovered, and how are other areas of photographic criticism, whether geographical, academic, thematic and/or genre-based, developing elsewhere?