It is a disturbing picture of marriage sign that the American Ken Ruth in 1979. The smiling face of spouses, one sees nothing: the picture is framed on the white dress of the bride - because too white overexposed. And on the hands of the couple while the groom grabs one of his bride, it will divide the elbow nervously. The sweat all the anxiety. In framing these revealing details, the photographer has pieces of finery prefabricated happiness. This image of Ruth Ken, an artist somewhat forgotten, is to discover the National Library, site Richelieu, among 300 images of American 1970s.

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To appreciate the exhibition, we must go beyond its title misleading. "Seventies, the shock of American photography" does not provide a comprehensive overview or representative images produced abundant at that time the United States. The BNF has made his selection from his collection, and there are big holes. Includes an obvious: the virtual absence of color photographs, while this decade is precisely that which saw the color venture off the field to win the commercial art field - not without controversy. What's so black and white, except a picture of clouds and dreamy painting by William Eggleston, in small form.

But if instead of playing as absentees (no color, few conceptual ...), focus on the present, the exhibition is a good surprise. Because this selection of vintage prints, rarely shown, avoids the fragmentation, preferring ensembles presented in a clash educational and intelligent - despite a rather too small. The Diane Arbus portrait or picture virtuoso street Garry Winogrand there take a great place.

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But the exhibition is mainly because it offers an unusual journey behind the scenes of these 1970s, with artists ignored or neglected by posterity, but who built the history of photography.

The American seventies are remarkable because they finally bury the notion of "beautiful image" pictorial references, the sharpness of straight photography are thrown into oblivion by artists eye to the practice rather amateur, playing the move, accidents framing . With its self-portraits, Lee Friedlander seems collecting trips contrary to any photographic propriety. Subject later, everything is art, everything is photographing the daily, the morbid, the intimate. Thirty-seven years later, the photos Larry Clark has made his friends teens junkies at Tulsa (Oklahoma) in 1971 is still in the throat by their raw and proximity of subjects and photographer.

But others remained less famous artists also give a good overview of issues of the day. Joe Deal, alongside the group of New Topographics, rethinking the traditional documentary at the same time that the notion of landscape with images austere, this photographer is conducting a series on the San Andreas fault in California, said that the footprint man on the environment and leaves the threat of an earthquake.

Some works, however, have aged poorly, as the provocative staging of Les Krims, which sought by the absurd and the grotesque to undermine social conventions.

The exhibition, finally, is not only indicative of photography in the United States in the 1970s. It further states that the subjectivity of the curator who was the collection of the French National Library, Jean-Claude Lemagny, and the influence of the French photographic scene, which still dominate the story and the heirs of Henri Cartier-Bresson: the BNF , Street photography (Garry Winogrand, Bruce Gilden) is overrepresented.

If the curator was not sensitive to color research, he preferred instead of formal experiments recalling the European avant-garde of the 1930s. As the work of Burk Uzzle, based on the geometry and abstraction, past fashion. Or collages surréalistes Arthur Tress or Jerry Uelsmann. But they have not even left the impression that Ralph Eugene Meatyard: an optician capable of creating, in the depths of Kentucky, a world apart with the help of her children, grotesque masks and three pieces of string.
"Seventies, the shock of American photography." BNF, Richelieu site. Photo gallery, 58, rue de Richelieu, Paris-2nd. M ° Exchange or Palais-Royal. Tuesday to Saturday from 10 am to 19 pm on Sunday from 12 to 19 hours. Until 25 January 2009. € 5 to 7 €.
Catalog: 70's: the shock of American photography. 340 p., 250 illustrations, ed. BNF. 48 €.

Claire Guillot