“Photographers are a different breed of human being,” Christian Caujolle as soon as stated. “Not the ones who are producers of images but those who are able to propose a different point of view. The ones whose perspective is not about reproduction but interpretation, using such a strange and specific tool as photography. And always with a tension between realism and fantasy.”
The founding father of the influential Agence Vu, who died in Tarbes, France, on 20 October, aged 72, was a seminal determine in French images, and by extension, an immense affect on how the medium is perceived world wide. Starting out as a critic after which images director at one among France’s main newspapers, then establishing Vu as an company and later a gallery, he was a prolific author and curator identified for his energetic help of younger expertise, and an unyielding dedication to the assertion of the photographer as an auteur.
“My passion for photography probably comes from the fact that, when I was a child, I had no access at all to visual culture,” Caujolle as soon as stated. “It has fuelled me with curiosity.” He was born in 1953 and grew up on his grandparents’ farm in a small village in south-west France. He studied in close by Toulouse for a 12 months, the place his encounters with Jean Dieuzaide, the founding father of the Château d’Eau gallery, have been transformative, encountering images as an artwork type.
At the centre of Parisian mental life
At the École Normale Supérieure in Paris he studied fashionable literature, turned buddies along with his academics Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, and ready a thesis with Pierre Bourdieu. He labored with Foucault after college, together with analysis for Je Suis Pierre Rivière, which was tailored right into a e-book and movie, and began as a journalist at Libération, the leftist newspaper co-founded and initially edited by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1973 within the wake of the 1968 protests. He wrote about artwork and literature, and more and more turned his consideration to images, spending most Saturdays on the gallery of Agathe Gaillard in Paris’s Marais district, the primary gallery in France completely dedicated to the medium. It was right here, within the late Nineteen Seventies, that he met lots of the greats of post-war French images, akin to Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Brassaï, in addition to guests from overseas, together with André Kertész, Bill Brandt and Larry Clark.
He and Hervé Guibert at Le Monde have been an integral a part of a transformative time for images’s recognition and standing in France. “Christian and his peers really trained a generation to be interested in photography,” says François Hébel, a recent of Caujolle greatest identified for his management on the Les Rencontres d’Arles photograph competition. Then, in 1981, when Libération was relaunched, he turned the director of images, answerable for the visible content material of the day by day newspaper.
“He changed the way photography was used in newspapers,” says Hébel. He would fee unknown photographers, and he gave established names stunning assignments. William Klein was despatched to cowl Pope Jean Paul II’s go to to Lourdes in 1980, as a result of Caujolle wished “an irreverent eye”. Raymond Depardon was commissioned to ship an image per day to seem within the newspaper’s overseas affairs pages, accompanied by a diaristic textual content about his temper. Sophie Calle’s The Address Book ran as a summer time column. “Many photographers owe their careers to him because of his willingness to take chances and his incredible eye.”
Agence Vu, which Caujolle described as “photographers’ agency, not a photo agency”, emerged as a particular undertaking in a small workplace on the newspaper. He left Libération to launch Vu in 1986, difficult the normal information photograph company mannequin by enrolling photographers who introduced a extra subjective strategy. It was enormously influential, however “he wasn’t a natural entrepreneur”, says Hébel, who was the director of Magnum Photos in Paris throughout roughly the identical interval.
Caujolle was maybe on the top of his affect when he fulfilled a long-held dream to open an exhibition area. Galerie Vu opened in 1997 with Caujolle as its inventive director. He and Vu each turned related to an introspective, stream-of-consciousness kind of images exemplified by Antoine d’Agata and Michael Ackerman. “Those were two he really pushed,” says Hébel. “He also supported photographers like Anders Petersen, Denis Darzacq and [many others]. The work became darker, more introspective. He was always ahead, sensing what was next… He had a nose for discovery.”
‘He had faith in intuition’
The Swedish photographer J.H. Engström was one such “discovery”. “When Christian was in Stockholm, I went to meet him. I laid out all the prints for [the photographic diary] Trying to Dance. The whole floor of the lobby was covered. He looked at them and said, very simply but with great conviction, ‘This has to be exhibited.’ And right there, on the spot, he proposed an exhibition at Galerie Vu.” What impressed him about Caujolle’s strategy within the years that adopted that first encounter? “He was an intellectual, but he went beyond theory — and very few people do that. Theory and intellectual patterns are like crutches for many in this business… [but] he had faith in intuition.”
Photography was for him about following what you consider… taking adventures inside your self
Anders Petersen, photographer
Engström’s trainer, Anders Petersen, remembers an identical encounter that led him to additionally be part of Vu within the early 2000s, starting an extended friendship and dealing partnership: “[he] was absolutely honest, but also warm, generous and full of solidarity. You felt part of his family… Photography, for him, was about life and following what you believe… Taking adventures inside yourself. That’s how he lived too.”
In the identical 12 months that Galerie Vu opened, Caujolle was the visitor director of Les Rencontres d’Arles, and he repeated the position at smaller photograph festivals within the Netherlands, the Basque area and in Sweden, earlier than establishing his personal, Phnom Penh Photo, in 2008. Monica Allende, a London-based curator and competition director who took over from him at each GetxoPhoto and Landskrona Foto, says he was a visionary, particularly in how he conceptualised images in public areas. “I saw his genius up close. He had this way of understanding the local culture and making it central,” she says. “In Phnom Penh, he projected images onto boats that drifted along the river, turning the city’s daily life into part of the exhibition. It was extraordinary, and so thoughtful, so respectful.”
Caujolle curated numerous small reveals platforming rising photographers, however there have been main exhibitions additionally: the Lithuanian Pavilion on the 2003 Venice Biennale, Gérard Rondeau on the Grand Palais in Paris, and Things as They Are: Photojournalism in Context Since 1955, which toured globally. Throughout, he all the time wrote, producing dozens of monographs, prefaces, catalogues and, in 2007, a type of memoir of his encounters with images, titled Circonstances Particulières (Special circumstances) introduced in two volumes by Actes Sud.
In January 2010 he was appointed Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Ten years later, he was appointed inventive adviser at Galerie du Château d’Eau, the place he noticed his first images exhibition 50 years earlier. Then, in 2024, the 12 months earlier than he misplaced his battle with most cancers, Caujolle was implicated in an accusation of sexual assault within the Eighties. Caujolle vigorously denied the allegations and the investigation stays ongoing. In a press release, Les Rencontres d’Arles celebrated Caujolle’s “immense contribution to the world of photography”, however acknowledged the accusations by including: “His passing leaves the world of photography suspended between emotion, gratitude and questioning.”
Christian Caujolle, born Sissonne, Hauts-de-France, 26 February 1953; director Agence Vu 1986-1998, inventive director Galerie Vu 1998-2007; died Tarbes, 20 October 2025