Photography as a means of analysing the landscape, the complexity of modern cities and society. We discussed the topic with Steve Bisson, Head of Photography at Paris College of Art, founder of Urbanautica and curator.
In an ever-evolving art scene, where contemporary art intersects with documentary photography and visual storytelling, few curators have been able to chart paths of reflection like Steve Bisson. Professor of photography at the Paris College of Art, curator and founder of Urbanautica, an internationally recognised platform for research and dissemination of photographic and visual projects, Bisson has collaborated with numerous artists and photographers, promoting work that explores identity, memory and landscape.
In this interview, Bisson discusses the role of the curator today, the challenges facing photography, and his many projects. He takes us through his experiences, offering a privileged insight into how photography can help generate awareness and change.
Let’s start this interview with a question about your personal background. You speak Italian and English fluently: where are you from?
Hi Francesca, and thank you for this space and time you’re giving me. So, I’m a “mestizo,” as they say—Venetian on my father’s side, with a French surname that dates back to Napoleon’s campaigns, and a soldier from around Montpellier. On my mother’s side, she was born in Belgium to a Dutch family. My grandfather was from Hoboken, New Jersey, on the Hudson river. I grew up a bit here and there; I’ve lived in Brussels, London, and now I’m in Paris. People like me often speak multiple languages; my mother spoke five, and we easily feel at home while traveling and when exchanging views with people from other parts of the world. We can imagine a broader world while also appreciating the richness of its diversity, and specificities. Generally, I don’t know how to answer the question, “Where do you come from?” To be honest, I don’t know. I’m still searching for the answer. But isn’t this the question that many have tried to answer since the dawn of time?
How did your International background influence your career?
I think it has made me perhaps nomadic, uncertain, and curious. Prone to doubt. I walk on a magic carpet. I hate moving, but I have no escape. Has this influenced my career? Perhaps it has. But what has truly influenced my career is reading and the willingness to embrace the thoughts of others.
History repeats itself, and sometimes it doesn’t. My career has allowed me to come across stories from around the world, independent and enlightening experiences. Some of these have come to an end. I like to remember meeting the guys from The Salt Yard in Hong Kong: Gary, Lit, and Dustin. It was before the ‘Umbrella Revolution’ and the protests. There was a unique buzz in the air. They had created a one-of-a-kind space for exhibitions, dialogue, and above all, an exceptional bookstore. I am proud to have curated their first exhibition. That space no longer exists, but their memory lives on in me, and I’m sure in many others who visited it, even for a brief time. Their dream is part of mine; it gave me strength and drives me to keep going in this career. And just like theirs, the dream of many others.
You graduated in Urban Planning at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura – IUAV of Venice. How did your interest in photography begin?
I think my interest in seeing was born in the back seat of a car, as a child, when every summer I traveled across Europe with my family. The wallet contained different coins and banknotes: the French franc, the Spanish peseta, the German mark, the Italian lira. There were no cell phones, computers, or the internet. There were no low-cost flights, and we were forced to build a vision of the world from details, nuances, the sounds of different languages, scents, and colors.
University, on the other hand, pushed me to develop a different perspective, at times cynical, disillusioned, towards the world—one that embraces complexity, a gaze that questions, analyzes, observes. A gaze that “touches,” that dares in some way, that strives to forge a connection. The gaze of the anthropologist, of the one who looks where others don’t. In the vernacular, in the details, in the parts of the whole, in the already-seen, searching to understand, interpret, and discern. Yes, my interest in photography stems from there. From a need for synthesis that the complexity of the territorial scale reveals, which photography doesn’t reduce but helps to read.
This motivation is at the heart of many of the curatorial projects and research undertaken in recent years, increasingly focused on designing educational and environmental interventions on local grounds. I think of the installation ‘Prospettiva fitocentrica’ created with the Synap(see) collective at the Centro Pecci on monumental trees, in collaboration with Urban Jungle at the Municipality of Prato. It followed a three-year period of environmental investigations across Italy, culminating in an exhibition at the Fondazione Benetton Studi e Ricerche. Not to mention the publications, first and foremost ‘La Terra di Sotto’ with photographer Luca Quagliato and journalist Luca Rinaldi, which gives a face to the chronicle of the polluted landscape in Northern Italy, or the book ‘Formula di un disastro invisibile’ with biologist Federico Bevilacqua, which reconstructs the PFAS tragedy in Veneto, the worst case of water pollution in Europe. And the list goes on.
What do you believe is the role of a curator in contemporary photography?
This question contains many! You will find the answer at the end of the interview. But to understand it, you will need to read the rest first. Find a clue in the photo below.
In 2009 you founded 'Urbanautica', an international editorial platform focused on contemporary photography and visual research. It is an influential space for photographers, artists, and scholars to share their work, ideas, and research. How do you choose the photographers or artists you work with?
In various ways. Some contact us directly via email, submitting a portfolio or a book. The annual call has become a useful observatory for selecting dozens of projects, some of which are winners featured in a printed catalog since 2019, while the rest contribute to reviews, thematic writings, exhibitions, podcasts, and more. You could say it’s the internet network through which we draw. And social media for interesting discoveries. The criteria for selection pertain to the projects and the themes that intersect with our field of investigation, which ranges from the anthropology of territory to cultural landscapes, including transformations of memory, nature, communities, and cities.
Urbanautica is a neologism I created to connect two defining phenomena of the new millennium: nautica, or navigation, which tends to skim the surface of the oceans of information, and urbanism as the mental and physical backdrop of contemporary civilization—an expression of accumulation, densification, crossroads, multiculturalism, the transfiguration of values, control and surveillance, the mineralization of souls, and the cementing of the sacred, to name a few… We are primarily curious about the people who use visual media to discuss these issues, and we are drawn to them. We are interested in their motivations and reasons why, and how it all translates into visual strategies.
Some also contact us for readings, coaching, publications, and advice. I believe that persistence and quality pay off on the internet, having seen blogs rise and fall like fireworks over the past fifteen years. At the beginning of 2025, we will launch the new online platform, a significant milestone after several years of editorial commitment and a way to celebrate the first quarter-century of the new millennium.
How can photography help us in reflecting on the complexities of modern cities and societies?
Photography helps us see. And first and foremost, it should help those who create it. Then, it can also serve those who view it. In relation to complexity, it can assist not so much in summarizing, as I mentioned earlier, but in distinguishing the real from reality, or what I call the visible. The city, or urbanism more accurately, compresses the individual into themselves to the point of imploding. The rising clinical expressions are depression, anxiety, mania, and panic.
In my opinion, photography, beyond its traditional role as a recorder—which is still useful for giving a face to the other side of the coin—can actually be a tool for engaging actively or critically with our surroundings, prompting us to question what and how we see, and in some way, initiating a desire for change, even in our own vocabulary. More generally, it can help counter the nihilistic drift experienced while traveling underground in many subways around the world, in that kind of waiting that feels like vacuum, surrounded by an absence of dialogue amidst alien noise, in a climate of peaceful indifference, since a shared pain is more acceptable. It can help us process the mourning of the civilization we are becoming, and attempt to break free from an autistic underground by identifying fractures and cracks in our description of the world.
My work still helps me to challenge, question, create friction, and re-start perception through curatorial devices and tools for participation. For example, this is what I have been doing since 2020 at the Lab27 cultural center in Treviso, through 17 exhibitions and over 40 public events in a peripheral, industrial, and seemingly insignificant area.
How do you see the role of photography in today's world, where images are so easily produced and consumed?
Today we navigate through images; the image is the landscape, no longer merely representing it. This changes our relationship with images. The truthfulness of images is compromised first by manipulation and now by artificialization. People believe less and less in images; instead, they allow themselves to be carried away by them. Again, it’s about navigation. People are images, avatars, profiles, advertisements, emoticons, and photos. Human beings have become an image of themselves, and this risks isolating them. That’s why certain natives did not want to be photographed—to remain authentic, pure in some way, so as not to be deprived of subjectivity and meaning.
Now, as a techno-capitalist society, we have catapulted ourselves to the opposite extreme. We have reached the point where if we do not appear, we do not exist. Not only has the body become a commodity, but it has also become an image. So what is the role of the photographer, beyond that of photography? It is to help us think through images, to restore meaning to the evaporated word, to the evanescent language. We can do this on our own every day by using the phone in our pocket differently. However, it is also necessary to do this in schools, with young people—a literacy of the gaze, of seeing, and of understanding the world. The alternative is the iconodrama we know, a collective that is a victim of its own image. Unfortunately, politics is far from reversing this trend. In fact, it is a spectacle, with the image at the center rather than the human. If the human being ceases to exist, it is on the mourning of humanity that we must work.
Can you share a particularly challenging project you’ve worked on as a curator? What did you learn from that experience?
My entire career has been a challenge. Living as a curator is not easy. But I have learned that there is nothing better than insisting on doing what makes you willingly get up in the morning. The role of the “street curator,” one who tries to interfere in reality, locally, who acts with what is available to instigate small cultural earthquakes capable of moving steps and consciousness. We don’t need great curators, “star curators,” but rather many curatorial forces capable of creating a system, connecting to weave a fabric, perhaps a safety net today, to take care of neighborhoods, relationships, and communities—not galleries, bank accounts, or stateless individuals.
The challenge for institutions and actors dedicated to culture or art, for me, is this; the rest is just bubbles at the openings… I like to think of the curator as a cultivator of images. Cultivating the land takes time, proximity, oxygenation, light, recognizing the right seeds, and understanding the soil and its ingredients. And cyclicity, return to oneself to learn, improve, die in a way, to be reborn, again.
Finally, it needs water to help it grow—love. Today we are in an era of intensive image production. We must slow down, create less, and allow time for images to grow, strengthen, and bear fruit. Otherwise, the flowers will not reach maturity. Images wither quickly.
I still believe in education as an antidote, which is why I helped create the program ‘Blurring the Lines’ nearly ten years ago—a unique international network of dozens of visual arts schools that continues to grow, giving a platform to thesis works, students, alumni, and experts through conferences, papers, books, meetings, and seminars. Here’s, in a way, what I’ve done over the years: perhaps I’ve grown a nursery. And I keep doing it today as the Head of the Photography Department at Paris College of Art.
LINK
- What is the role of contemporary photography? We asked Steve Bisson - November 15, 2024
- The faceless art of Gideon Rubin - March 29, 2024
- A conversation with Christina Nakou and Anna Pangalou about the Transiens Nostrum project - November 23, 2023
