2023-11-03 08:04:00
Libération at 50 yearsdossierFrom the foundation, the image has been a fundamental support for the newspaper, but it was in 1981, thanks to Christian Caujolle, that a unique daily photographic policy was defined, which placed the image at the center of the design from Journal.
The real birth of Libé as a photographic newspaper dates from 1980 but all the ferment was already there since the foundation in 1973. Because the APL, the Libération press agency, founded in 1971 by journalists and far-left activists who would form the embryo of the future Libération, offered not only dispatches but also images. And Fotolib, the photo branch of the APL, will de facto be Libération’s first photo service. So, from the beginning, and even if there was not yet a photo policy strictly speaking, the material was there. All that was missing was a reflection on its enhancement.
This step was reached in April 1980, on the occasion of the death of Jean-Paul Sartre. Serge July intends to break the codes: the front page must be exceptional, commensurate with the importance of Sartre in intellectual life, of course, but also his unique link with Libé. July wants THE photo. The person responsible for unearthing the rare pearl is called Christian Caujolle. Journalist for Libé in Toulouse since 1973, he went to Paris in 1978 to join the editorial team and created a section in which he reported on exhibitions. He therefore urgently searches for the photo which will become the first “poster” of Libé. He scoured agency archives, but it was in Nouvel Obs that he finally found his image. This is a photo that has already been published, of course, but the gesture of putting it on the front page of a daily newspaper creates a precedent. The root of a concept that Libé would invent the following year: the daily magazine.
Offscreen and shift
Because during the cessation of publication in spring 1981, these few months when Libé began its transformation, Caujolle defined with July a real photographic policy which would become one of the essential markers of the newspaper: we respect the photographer’s point of view in the same way as that of the reporter, we do not reframe, we choose with him and we present the information starting from the image. Caujolle, from 1981, wanted author photographers: if he fought for his iconographers to have press cards, the photographers are not salaried. For each subject, it is a question of finding an eye, a point of view, a shift which corresponds to the way in which we intend to present the news. And that changes everything. His first order, in May 1981, was to commission Magnum photographers to cover the inauguration of François Mitterrand. At the Libé rate… From Cartier-Bresson to Martine Franck, everyone accepts.
Over the years, bias takes hold. In the summer of 1981, Caujolle entrusted Raymond Depardon with a daily column, “New York Correspondence”. We complain a little internally about this “lost” place. Not long. The format is essential, François Hers and Sophie Calle will play the game the following two years. In 1982, Gilles Favier showed off-camera at the Cannes Film Festival; the following year, Xavier Lambours inaugurated the tradition of Cannes portraits. In 1984, John Vink set his eye on the Tour de France, an experience renewed in 1985 with Sebastião Salgado, whose founding work he then undertook in the Sahel camps Libé published three times in the same year. At the same period, Caujolle asked Françoise Huguier to take a different look at fashion shows and their backstage. Or for Jean-Claude Coutausse to reinvent, by shifting, the political portrait. Because the gap is a trademark: “If the journalist tells you something, you do the opposite,” Caujolle confides to Gilles Favier. In 1986, he left to launch the VU agency, created within Libération as part of a project to launch a weekly newspaper. The magazine would not be made, but the agency was born.
At the heart of the editorial process
In the wake of Caujolle, Louis Mesflé, Laurent Abadjian, Dan Torres, Luc Briand, Mina Rouabah and then myself continued, each in our own way, to bring this state of mind to life. In 1994, the launch of the last page portrait made it possible to weave a daily photographic thread, centered on intimacy, responding to the front page which testifies to the upheaval of the world. Today, with almost 1,800 days of orders per year, Libération is the French daily which produces the most images. And it is this attention to the work of each photographer that pushes them to work for Libé, even if it is not always very well paid. Of course, digital is a game changer. The dialogue no longer takes place at the heart of the editorial staff around contact sheets developed in the newspaper’s lab, but it has found new forms. Photographers remain at the heart of the editorial process, as demonstrated by the Libé des photographes, published every year since 2015 on the occasion of the Rencontres d’Arles; as evidenced by the layout of each page, whose type of visual narration derives from the photo material and not the other way around; or as the design of the front page illustrates every day. Unlike the rest of the daily press, it is the photo that is chosen first, before searching for the title. Always.
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