Through November 3, 2012, the Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris will present La Condition Humaine (The Human Condition), a retrospective Peter Turnley’s photography.

The sixty photographs, mainly in color, were selected by Turnley for the way they convey an idea or atmosphere that transcends time to make them, in a way, universal.

We see anxious faces, distraught and tear-streaked, like a man in a psychiatric hospital in Moscow (1993), a Romanian in Bucharest in 1989, a child refugee with its mother, a father holding up pictures of his missing children (1999), and a marine training at Camp Pendleton in California. In other pictures, we see knowing glances and other happy and poetic moments, often taken in Paris, his adopted country, which he visited for the first time in 1975 before returning there to work, study and spend his vacations. That’s where we find a concierge and a little girl playing ball on the Rue de Lappe, two women at the Ma Bourgogne café on the Place des Vosges (1982), a model, waitress and guitarist at a brasserie on the Île Saint Louis. Oddly, these are almost all in black and white, and will be included in an upcoming book, French Kiss.

But how, with so few images, to put together a retrospective covering four decades?

Peter Turnley started taking pictures in 1972. “For me, photography is primarily a way to share,” he says. “The camera is a tool that allows me to share realities, emotions and feelings that I myself experience through everything I witness and observe.”

But what does that mean for an adolescent growing up in a conservative state like Indiana? Fortunately, Turnley’s family was progressive, taking part in the struggle for civil rights. For him, sharing through photography meant protesting against Vietnam War, fighting for civil rights, supporting feminism, and developing the American Dream where the disadvantaged are left behind.

It was the vagaries of life that allowed Peter Turnley to put these principles into practice. Deeply involved in sports, especially American football, an accident left him bedridden. It was during his long recovery that this parents gave him Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Face of Asia. It triggered something in him. No longer able to play sports, every day after school he went to the black, Hispanic and working-class neighborhoods to take pictures.

“Photography become a pretext for the discovery a new world,” he says. “It offered me a way to speak to others and share with them what I observed. For forty years, I’ve noticed that the verb ‘to share’ is underutilized in our vocabulary, because every time we share something, there is a feeling a love that comes with it. It was always apparent for me that the people or subjects that I photograph are more important than the photograph itself. I use photography as a means of drawing attention to the plight of people suffering serious injustices.”

Try to do something to make the world a better place: that’s the precept underlying Turnley’s photography. After filing a few local reports, he refined his technique by studying the visual language of other photographers: those from the French Humanist school (Doisneau, Ronis, Cartier-Bresson, Boubat), the American schools of photography that used the image to condemn injustice and bring about social reforms (Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, the Farm Security Administration with Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein), and other exemplary photographers like Robert Capa and W. Eugene Smith.

In 1975 he spent four months documenting poverty in California, and decided when he came back to show his work to Eugene Smith, who took Turnley aside and told him, “Peter, you’ve got a good heart and a good eye. It’s your move.” Those encouraging words led him to put his studies on hold and move to Paris.

He was dazzled by the French language, its history, its social issues and its critical mind. “At Picto one day, I saw a group of people gathered around a print by Henri Cartier-Bresson, discussing its grayscale.” Back in America, he finished school, and traveled across the country, saving money in order to return to France.

Marked by the importance of the work performed in a photo lab, he applied for a job at Pictorial Service. To test his skills, Pierre Gassmann subjected Turnley to a test: print one hundred negatives in a single day. Voya, one of the printers at Picto, helped him pass the test. It was the beginning not only of a friendship that lasts to this day, but a part-time position at Picto. Turnley spent the rest of his time taking classes at Sciences Po.

But the most important contact he made then was Robert Doisneau, who asked Turnley to be his assistant before introducing him to the Rapho agency.

There he met photographers whose stories from abroad gave him the urge to travel. He jumped at the opportunity in 1984 when, to commemorate the Normandy landings, he was asked to photograph veterans. He spent a month in Normandy, and when he brought the results to Newsweek, the owner of the magazine decided to put one of Turnley’s photographs on the cover of the next issue. Millions of readers would be able to share in the emotion he felt meeting these heroes. It also marked the beginning of an 18-year collaboration with the magazine, first as a correspondent in Paris and later for the whole world. “My studies in politics gave me a sense of where the next big story would happen in the world,” says Turnley. “But I always called my editor before heading out.”

“Until 2001, I traveled to more than ninety countries, covering wars in Eastern Europe, revolutions, famines in Somalia, earthquakes and other catastrophes, September 11, the massacre of students in China... It was a picture of the human condition, not just of suffering, injustice and disasters, but also of sweet and poetic moments. I can justify my commitment because I believe that, even with all these victims, life can still be something beautiful.

I also show that other aspects of life are poetic, inspiring and just. I have always been inspired by my friends, and some of my heroes in photography were both war correspondents and peace correspondents. I have known both war and peace, but I prefer to be considered a correspondent of life.

We have arrived at a moment where the models have changed, but I think that this is one of the most important moments in the history of photography. If photography does indeed exist to be shared, with the Internet, we have never had so many opportunities for sharing.

That might seem to go against what people say, but the decision to publish a photograph used to be in the hand of people besides the photographer. Now, when I come back from a trip, I’m control of which photographs to release, and how soon.

Times certainly aren’t easy, but we have to seize every opportunity. Last year, I had the opportunity to conduct three workshops in Cuba, where I was able to work with both street photography and the country’s geopolitical history. What magazine today could send me to cover a subject like that? I work for myself now, and I can find my own way to have my photographs published.

I’m 57 now. When I was young, I learned from Cartier-Bresson that the most interesting thing in life is not to maintain the humdrum of daily life. Starting from this principle, I continue to believe that at any moment I might encounter something that will change my life completely.”

Interview conducted by Bernard Perrine
Bernard.Perrine1@orange.fr

Peter Turnley - "La condition Humaine"
Until november 3rd 2012
Galerie Agathe Gaillard
3 rue du Pont Louis-Philippe
75004 Paris - France
+ 33 (0) 142 77 38 24
galerie@agathegaillard.com