When the documentary photographer Jacques Windenberger decided to tell the story of his career, he separated it into periods, as a historian would do. And it did indeed take a historian to provide a frame of reference for the 400,000-plus documents preserved in the Bouches-du-Rhône archives in the south of France. Un Même Monde, Windenberger’s attempt at a summary of his career, is a well documented work that serves also as a sort of catalogue for his archives. After a lifetime of documentation, what’s worth keeping?

Windeberger proudly assumes his title as the chronicler of France, a photographer who traces the mutations and upheavals that marked our society. As curator and director of the archives, Jacqueline Ursch, underlines, “Photography, like oral records, was for a long time dismissed by archivists, so its presence in state archives is rather recent. These documents could eventually serve as a complementery archives to the public ones.”

In addition to its documentary value, Un Même Monde demonstrates above all the work of a photographer, and how, over the course of fifty years, Windeberger took charge of documenting our society: the confines of everyday life, the drudgery of work in the city as well as the country, trade unions, pastimes, pain, love, the evolution of our values and our way of life, parties, protests, immigration and its controversies, life on the street and street life.

The work covers four separate periods: a consumer society of unequaled growth from 1950 to 1973; crises and incertitude from 1973 to 1989; social and global trauma from 1980 to 1990; and the final section, which covers the last decade, evokes the title of the book, Un Même Monde (One and the Same World).

If Windenberg set out to follow the example of the “concerned” American photographers who focussed above all on their own society, the book (especially the final section) shows how quickly he was forced to look beyond French borders.

The reader who does more than merely leaf through the book will discover much material for reflection. Those who lived through these times can refresh their memories in these images. Younger readers can use them to imagine how we ended up where we are today.

Bernard Perrine

Un même monde
Parcours documentaire 1958-2008
Jacques Windenberger, photographs
Jean-Marie Guillon, text
Éditions Images en Manœuvres /
Archives départementales des Bouches du Rhône
432 pages, 400 photographs

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