It took 40 years for Paris to pay tribute to this New Yorker who has lived in France since 1971. This June 2011, Jane Evelyn Atwood, who has been a photographer since 1974, will have her first retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), (Jane Evelyn Atwood, photographs 1976-2010, from June 29 through September 25 2011), as well as her first work accompanied by an augmented edition of never before seen pictures. The retrospective traces a 35 year old engagement through more that 200 photographs, from the first “reportage” (would she love that term to sum up her work?), to the Parisian prostitutes, through the streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, shown recently at the Rencontres d’Arles.

This retrospective made with meticulous care, comprises six series on which she has been very committed. In addition to the two already mentioned, this retrospective shows the series on blind people, women in prison, “Jean-Louis, Vivre et mourir du Sida” (Jean Louis, To live and die with AIDS) and the victim of anti-personnel mines.
Other works in the line of what Americans have called “concerned photographer”, after her first exhibition in 1967, gathered around Robert Capa, W.Bischof, L.Freed, A.Kertész, D.Seymour et D.Weiner.

However, Jane Evelyn Atwood has also been marked by the work of Diane Arbus. It is for these reasons that these series are not only only just reportages.

These are her “long distance” works, in which time does not count anymore. In her feature on the Foreign Legion, she was blocked for three weeks in a cellar in Beirut. In developing her AIDS feature, she lived in the home of Jean-Louis, “I could not leave him alone at night,” and she kept him company until his death “because he asked me to”.

A “long distance” also because she considers her series or finished feature only when she is aware that she’s gone all the way, “an obsession of being complete that contrasts with the simplicity, the bareness of images…”
A long distance that also allows her to gain the confidence in order to reach intimacy and deliver an in depth view on the photographed subject to capture a look, a gesture, an expression or even a feeling.

More that a reportage, Jane Evelyn Atwood’s work could be defined as “a journalism on subjects, that imposes itself as urgencies, a journalism of wrath and rage…”
An engagement that we find since the first feature on prostitutes in the rue des Lombards that enables her to obtain the first grant from the W. Eugene Smith Foundation in 1980 without having published a single photograph. A grant that will allow her to continue her feature on blind children that she had just begun.

This retrospective, clearly shows the personal path that the photographer followed, a photography that commits and testifies to try to make misconceptions evolve, sometimes on the border of restrictions. That is the direction of a series like the Foreign Legion that allowed her to bring a new point of view on the legionnaires. Or the one produced in 1989 on “incarcerated women” in the world’s worst prisons over 10 years, portraying 40 prisons in nine countries in Europe and the United States. Or even the series on anti-personnel mines, to awaken the universal conscience. It’s also the case in 2005 for Haiti, when the photographer chose to work in color “to testify the dignity and the hopes of the people that are not determined to fatality.

Bernard Perrine
Institut de France
Académie des Beaux Arts
Bernard.Perrine1@orange.fr

Jane Evelyn Atwood
Photographies 1976-2010
Through 25 september

Maison Européenne de la Photographie
5 /7 rue de Fourcy
75004 Paris
+33 (0)1 44 78 75 00

RUE des LOMBARDS
June 23 – September 24
Closed: 1 – 31 August
Galerie in camera
21 rue Las Cases
75007 Paris

Publications
Jane Evelyn Atwood
Collection Photo Poche # 125
Actes Sud

Haïti
Actes Sud

Rue des Lombards
ed. Xavier Barral