The Arles School of Photography by Compass and by Dreams

Cameras are Geminis. They have a dual personality and two openings: one for seeing (viewfinder) and one for taking (lens). Photography also has a dual personality. In fact, for a century and a half, every flutter of human activity has been caught and immediately stored away on shelves of collective memory under two categories: found images and invented images.

Now these two different approaches are also two metaphors for the education of man: the metaphor for the rational approach is the window through which man looks and finds; whereas the metaphor for the other, more emotional and even magical, approach is the mirror, in which man looks at himself and searches for his identity, as did Narcissus. The former is information, the latter initiation. The one is Christopher Columbus on his informative voyage by compass. The other is Ulysses on his initiation journey inspired by a dream.

Such is the spirit in which ENP (France's National School of Photography) has defined its aim, namely to train students selected by competitive examination a year or two after finishing school, to become Image People, that is people who will have to think about the world as much as to photograph it, and who will have to produce, plan, work out, disseminate, and conserve our society's indispensable and omnipresent images.

Alain Desvergnes - Director, Ecole Nationale de la Photographie