Authorless Pictures: Uses of Photography in Christian Boltanski's Early Work (1969–75)

This essay considers Christian Boltanski's engagement with photography in the 1970s, at a time when its circulation was still largely confined to the realms of amateur practice. However,this was also the period that prepared the eventual acceptance of photography as a form of art, thereby raising questions regarding the function and the status of the artist-photographer. These issues were explored by Boltanski in his series "Images modeles" (1973-1975) and his playful and sometimes knowingly false autobiographic reconstructions. His engagement with the polemic surrounding the institution of authorship, as articulated by Roland Barthes in "The Death of the Author" (1968), is interpreted in the context of intellectual, historical and artistic events in France in the 1960s-1970s. In so doing an evaluation is offered of Boltanski's contribution to the history of photography, while challenging a number of dominant critical approaches to this artist's work.