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From February 5 to April 19, the Pavillon Populaire is inviting to rediscover one of the greatest French photographers of the mid-twentieth century. Jean-Philippe Charbonnier was certainly the least known and represented artist of the École humaniste of Paris, a photographic movement whose figures included Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Sabine Weiss and Édouard Boubat. However, his work, little shown in recent decades – with two major exhibitions at Paris Museum of Modern Art, one in 1983 and the other in 2014 -, particularly deserves to be re-emphasised. Indeed, Charbonnier offers a completely original view, perhaps from the most personal perspective from all the artists of this movement. Far from naivety, good feeling and the idealized vision of reality, his images offer an authentic and humble approach, at once poetic, empathetic and uncompromising, which provides them with a completely unparalleled power. In particular, such is the case of the shocking images from the 1955 documentary entitled ”Good for asylum: the whole truth about how mental illnesses are treated in France”, which would shake public opinion and lead the institution to work on the conditions of patients in psychiatric hospitals.

All-terrain photographer as at ease among miners of the North of France as he was behind the scenes of the fashion shows of Christian Dior, insatiable globetrotter, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier visited the most remote locales and the world’s largest cities, from Alaska to the Sein Island, from New York to Kyoto, from the Sahara Desert to American supermarkets. Everywhere, his gaze meets the one of the people he photographs, even in the middle of a crowd.

The exhibition is based around some major documentaries exclusively produced for the Réalités magazine. Among them, some of the most famous ones, like the one on psychiatric hospitals, are for the first time presented in their entirety. Other documentaries will also be presented, like a selection of color photographs which, until now, have been eliminated from the exhibitions because they were considered unworthy to be exhibited.

This retrospective also enables to discover contact sheets which reveal the selection, the cropping, but also the detailed captions chosen by the artist, as well as his fine analysis sometimes tinged with humor.