The camera was Jean Gottmann’s close companion during his recurring fieldtrips, an instrument that could keep up with the geographer’s swift pace of travel. From the early 1950s until the late 1970s, he produced thousands of photographic images of cityscapes and landscapes in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The meticulosity with which Gottmann photographed his surroundings on a day-to-day basis during his fieldtrips testifies of the importance that the geographer, trained in a French tradition of terrain research, attributed to observation and fieldwork. These images acted, during periods of reflexion in his offices in Princeton, Paris, or Oxford, as visual data, sources of inspiration and mnemonics for geographical reflections and analysis.
In the archive of over 4000 photographs recently digitalised in the Gallica platform of the BnF, we find images of urban and rural subjects photographed from a wide variety of perspectives. Gottmann photographed panoramic views from plains or high buildings, to capture an overview of space, moving landscapes from a car window or urban situations from a still street-view. Still, at the heart of his writing and photography, we find people and settlements, and a will to understand human psychology through space.
In this paper, we focus on the themes of change, regeneration, modernity, and the cleavage between the old and the new in the captions of the photographic images produced by Gottmann throughout the different decennia of his photographic productions. Firstly, as part of a photographic analysis, we examine the vocabulary of these captions and study how these relate to the iconography of Gottmann’s photographic images. Secondly, we examine the ways in which these themes return in different geographical areas and how they relate to one another. Lastly, we discuss the role the concepts such as change, and regeneration, play in Gottmann’s photographic oeuvre in relation to his theories on “iconography” and “movement”.
Mots clés : Photography |Iconography|Movement
A105142LH