Photograph, feminine expression and the power of images: a study on Claire Lejeune’s “photographismes

Abstract

This article aims to explain the relationship between photography, the western artistic canon, and subversive forms of expression. To a certain extent, the invention of photography wreaked havoc amongst European intellectuals in the last decades of the nineteenth century. By destroying the artistic supremacy of painting, photography fractured the traditional ways of representation. Now an essential form of modern art, photography has nevertheless outlasted those controversies from the past, thus becoming a useful instrument to explain or to subvert the world. Such ambivalence has been seductive for Claire Lejeune. Her “photographismes” represent an alternative technique to literary work whereby she presents her belief that it is necessary to join emergent voices