Révélations Berry/ Gruyaert/ Kalvar/ Le Querrec/Salgado/...

Exhibition at Musée Postal - 10 March at 20 September 2027

Revelations

Berry/ Gruyaert/ Kalvar/ Le Querrec/Salgado/...

At the beginning of the year 1991, La Poste entrusts six photographers Ian Berry, Raymond Depardon, Harry Gruyaert, Richard Kalvar, Guy Le Querrec,Sebastião Salgado. with a documentation mission throughout France. From sorting centres to rural tours, from ticket offices to aeropostal networks, they explore the multiple realities of the postal service. Through six reports, so many photographic writings are deployed around the same subject: La Poste, seized from the inside, as close as possible to professional gestures and human relations.

Everyone has a unique approach. Raymond Depardon immerses itself in an alpine village and captures, in black and white, the tour of a postman, revealing the subtle links that unite the agent to the inhabitants. Guy Le Querrec favors the moment and complicity, attentive to everyday gestures and exchanges. Sebastio Salgado immerses himself in the daily life of a postman in Paris as well as in the animation of a sorting center. Richard Kalvar follows a postman by bike, observes the activity of a sorting center and restores the intensity of the postal tarmac. Ian Berry stands near post offices, where social dynamics crystallize, while Harry Gruyaert explores the flow of mail passing by train and plane, composing images marked by color, reflections and artificial lights. .

This set, acquired by the Musée Postal in 2024, constitutes a rare corpus, at the crossroads of document and creation, revealing the behind-the-scenes of a changing public service. Like the formula Guy Le Querrec in 1991, it is “a look that crosses the counters to tell everything that the public does not see, does not know, cannot or does not want to know”.

Produced at a pivotal moment – that of the transformation of La Poste into a public establishment – these images offer a valuable testimony to the evolution of postal trades as well as photographic practices. Produced by members of Magnum Photos, they also shed light on the challenges of corporate ordering within the agency. However, the exhibition is not limited to images: it presents press prints, material objects that bear the traces of the uses and circulations of the image in the era of film. Selected, annotated, sometimes enlarged, these prints circulated between photographers, publishers and communication services before distribution.

Finally, the course puts in tension color and black and white, long associated with distinct regimes: color, dominant in institutional controls; black and white, privileged for more personal approaches. The exhibition thus questions the shifting boundary between document and creation.

To see from 10 March to 20 September 2027 to Musée Postal in Paris.