Hervé GLOAGUEN

MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS
2015-2016 : Musée d’Art Moderne de le Ville de Paris, « Warhol Unlimited » (group exhibition), Paris, France
2007 : Musée du Jeu de Paume « Viva, une agence photographique » (group exhibition), Paris, France
2006 : Musée Robert Doisneau, « Rétrospective », Gentilly, France
1995: Centre Culturel Franco-Vietnamien, « De Saigon à Hô Chi Minh-Ville », Paris, France
1992 : Festival Visa pour l’image, « Le marché mondial  du sang », Perpignan, France
1989 : Fondation du Crédit Foncier de France et  Arles, « Le miel et le bronze », 50 color portraits of nomadic women in Niger, France
1982 : Fondation Nationale de la Photographie, « Lyon, portrait d’une ville, Photographies couleurs », Lyon, France
1975 : International Photography Festival, Arles, France
1974: Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris , 50 photographies d’artistes Français contemporains (50 photographs of contemporary french artists), Paris, France

SOLO EXHIBITIONS  (selection)
Burkina Faso : Ouagadougou
France : Paris (Galerie Arcturus, Galerie Keller, Galerie Agathe Gaillard, Café les Editeurs, Fnac Montparnasse) ; Saint-Raphaël (Centre Culturel)
Germany : Koln, Galerie Wilde (VIVA)
Italy : Milan, Galerie Diaframa (VIVA)
United-Kingdom : London (London Photographers Gallery -VIVA); New Castle (Syde Galerie -VIVA)

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Canada : Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montréal
France : Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée Réattu, Arles ; Musée Nicéphore Niepce, Chalons sur Saône
Netherlands : Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 

BIBLIOGRAPHY
2015 : Hervé Gloaguen, « Au cœur du Jazz », CDP Editions, Malakoff
2009 : Hervé Gloaguen, « A hauteur de Jazz  », Edition La Martinière, Paris
1982 : Hervé Gloaguen, « Lyon », Edition Arthaud, Paris
1979 : Hervé Gloaguen, Edmond Humeau, « Loire Angevine », Edition Chêne, Paris
1973 : Anne Tronche, Hervé Gloaguen, « L’art actuel en France, du cinétisme à l’hyperréalisme  », Edition André Balland, Paris

Hervé Gloaguen was born in Rennes in 1937 and has lived in Paris since 1958.

After studying at the ETPC photography school on rue de Vaugirard in Paris, he became assistant to photographer Gilles Ehrmann, who introduced him to the art of photography and photojournalism, and launched his professional career. In his early days, Hervé Gloaguen also received support from filmmaker Chris Marker.

From 1964 to 1971, he worked as a freelance photographer for EDF’s “Creation-Distribution” department and received assignments for photojournalism from the magazine “Réalités.”

During this period, Hervé Gloaguen made several trips to the USA, discovering the vast American landscapes, Pop Art, and some iconic jazz venues, a genre he had been passionate about since his adolescence. His encounters with choreographer Merce Cunningham and painter Andy Warhol sparked his passion for contemporary visual art.

Between 1969 and 1973, he photographed the French art scene, culminating in the publication of the book “L’Art Actuel en France” (Current Art in France), published by André Balland in 1973, which was accompanied by an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (MAM).

In 1972, he participated in the creation of the “Viva” group, which brought together some of the best French photographers and influenced an entire generation of photojournalists.

In 1975, Hervé Gloaguen photographed the end of the Vietnam War and the fall of Saigon.

Between 1974 and 1995, Hervé Gloaguen frequently stayed in Rome and undertook a color photographic project, “A Rome la nuit” (In Rome by Night).

Since 1982, he has been represented by the Rapho Agency. In this capacity, he regularly contributed to Géo magazine between 1985 and 1990 and produced numerous photo essays in Africa. He also participated in the Rencontres Photographiques d’Arles (1989) with the exhibition “Honey and Bronze: Portraits of Nomadic Women in Niger,” and in the Perpignan “Visa pour l’Image” Festival (1992) with the exhibition “The World Blood Market.” Hervé Gloaguen also produced a significant photo essay on refugees in France at the request of the association “France Terre d’Asile” in 1985 and 1986.

In 2001, Hervé Gloaguen exhibited “Jazz” with five other photographers at the Agathe Gaillard Gallery in Paris.

From 2003 to 2006, he made several trips to London and began an in-depth photo essay on the city.

In 2006, he exhibited 100 photographs at the Maison de la Photographie Robert Doisneau in Gentilly and “Artists in Paris 1960-1970: A Look at a Generation” at the Galerie Arcturus, 65 rue de Seine, Paris.

In 2007, a retrospective exhibition of the Viva agency was presented at the Hôtel de Sully in Paris, under the auspices of the Jeu de Paume.

In 2009, the book “A hauteur de jazz” (At Jazz Height) was published by De La Martinière, and the exhibition “Jazz en scènes” (Jazz on Stage) was held at the Galerie Arcturus in Paris from March 31 to April 25, 2009.

In 2015, Hervé Gloaguen published “Au cœur du Jazz” (At the Heart of Jazz) with CDP.

In 2016, Hervé Gloaguen exhibited “New York in the Time of Andy Warhol” at the Galerie Arcturus in Paris.

HERVE GLOAGUEN, IMAGE DRIVER

A photojournalist and avid traveler, Hervé Gloaguen began by slipping into concert halls after nightfall to indulge his passion for jazz. He played the trumpet and now excels on the drums, but after experimenting with the Rolleicord, his favorite instrument remains the Leica. In black and white, or in color.

In his early days, all you needed was a Burberry jacket and a camera to get into the Salle Pleyel or the Olympia for free. “We arrived early, when the hall still smelled of stale tobacco, lit like a ship in port at night, with a gleaming black Steinway piano on stage, standing on its legs like a fighting bull awaiting its moment. Meanwhile, I was preparing my film, which then had to be pushed to 1000 ASA for lack of a flash, all the while catching glimpses of Ella Fitzgerald or Sonny Rollins between doorways.”

Asserting one’s identity alone, far from Brittany

Hervé Gloaguen has a passion for jazz. No, a “jazz frenzy,” he says, to the point of unloading train cars at the Rennes train station to buy his first trumpet. The son of the pharmacist from Hédé (35) could think of nothing better to reject the humdrum path of a predetermined life and “assert his identity alone, far from Brittany.” Expelled from the photography school on rue de Vaugirard in Paris, where he had acquired some basic skills, he frequented cabarets, the Kentucky on rue Valette, and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where jazz musicians served as his models. Having reconciled his two passions in the Paris of the late 1950s, he was happy “as a clam,” far from Vannes and its Jesuits. He avoided military service in Algeria but not the red-pom-pommed sailor’s cap, which he hid each evening in the bushes of the Ivry fort before heading to the smoky cellars of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He then became the assistant of Gilles Ehrmann, a baroque photographer whose images were staged like film shots. He was also introduced to industrial aesthetics, succumbing to the charms of EDF’s projects. In short, he understood that photography opened more doors than the trumpet and that paradise wasn’t east of Hédé but, more likely, on the other side of the Atlantic. Gloaguen arrived in New York in 1965, with the support of Réalités, a prestigious magazine that employed renowned photographers. He quickly found the address of the Apollo Theater in Harlem, then that of Preservation Hall in New Orleans, two of the cathedrals of jazz where this fellow traveler of the Communist Party channeled his sense of revolt. “While I’m ecstatic at concerts, in Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi, things are getting rough,” he wrote in “At Jazz Height,” aware of the racial tensions that would lead, three years later, to the assassination of Martin Luther King. To his idols, “young virtuosos with swaying hips and dark glasses or old hands with pockets bulging from a flask of whiskey,” he added Andy Warhol and Merce Cunningham, pop art, and dance. Then he embarked on a series of portraits of art in France: Arman, Ben, César, Le Gac, Monory… he sketched them all. “I like to arrive without knowing what I’m going to do,” he explains, “it’s like improvising in jazz. I impose total freedom on myself.”

Information through Images

This doesn’t preclude collective experiences, and in 1972, Gloaguen founded the Viva agency with seven other photographers, including Guy Le Querrec. More politically engaged than Rapho and less focused on celebrity than Gamma, it was a kind of anti-Magnum, bringing together the cream of the crop of photographers under the guidance of Henri Cartier-Bresson. In the libertarian wake of May 1968, Viva aimed to be a champion of information through images. United by a dual rejection of illustration and exoticism, its members were nonetheless compelled to travel the world and submit to current events, that insatiable, cold monster that only likes dishes served hot and spicy. Before the agency closed ten years later, Gloaguen had time to cover the fall of Saigon and then crisscross Africa, captivated by the simplicity of the biblical moments offered by chance encounters. And he keeps returning to immerse himself in the streets of Rome at night, where each evening a new play seems to unfold. But of Brittany, no images. “I don’t go there anymore, except once a year to Saint-Malo, alone and in winter. I look at the sea, I listen to the wind, I walk around the ramparts, and after two nights in a hotel, I leave,” he confides. “Perhaps one day I’ll go and photograph Brocéliande and Huelgoat. I’ve already dreamed about it… in color.”

By Thierry DUSSARD
July 11, 2010, Le Télégramme (translated from French)

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TWO YEARS OF WORK IN THE INTIMACY OF 80 CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS
Hervé GLOAGUEN: HIS CAMERA LENS PAINTS THE AVANT-GARDE

“I kept hearing people around me say that nothing was happening in Paris in the field of contemporary art. They would mention New York, London, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Zurich, but never Paris. I did my journalistic work and went to see if it was true.”

This is photographer Hervé Gloaguen speaking. He is one of the founding members of the Viva agency, created three months ago. For two years, he photographed the main “leaders” of contemporary art. He produced a book from which we have extracted these photos. This book, after various setbacks, unfortunately did not find a publisher… Hervé Gloaguen’s revelation of contemporary art came during encounters with John Cage and Merce Cunningham in New York in 1965-1966. A twenty-eight-year-old from Brittany, who had arrived in Paris six years earlier, expelled from the Vaugirard photography school (because he had never touched a camera), “exploited” by a press agency director (who was more interested in fraud than journalism), Gloaguen then did various jobs for Réalités, Saint Gobain, and EDF. The assertion of a “cultural desert in Paris” hardly satisfies him. He has observed that the birth of kinetic art, with Julio Le Parc and the Visual Art Research Group, and of New Realism, with César, Tinguely, and Martial Raysse, dates back to the early 1960s. “These two movements, born in Paris, were then unknown but important. The public had stopped at Mathieu and Buffet. For them, that was modernity. Yet, for ten years, something else had emerged, and we had hardly noticed.”

The audience for these new movements hadn’t extended beyond a select circle of five hundred people, their expression limited to small books and obscure journals. Nothing had been done to disseminate information more widely. This is where the idea for this book was born. To create it, Gloaguen collaborated with a young journalist, Anne Tronche, who, well-connected in this milieu, would write the text. “We made a list of names. We didn’t want an exhaustive work. Our aim was to express the atmosphere of modern art. Anne Tronche’s was to be informative. Mine was to see what was happening and translate it into photographs. To provide the most complete account possible, not necessarily of the individuals involved, but above all of the trends. Once the list of names was established, I started making inquiries.” For two years, in fact, between assignments and trips, Hervé Gloaguen pursued his quest. The reception was always positive. He doesn’t carry any bulky equipment with him. On the contrary, everything is done with a simple Nikon and in ambient light. Sometimes he only spends half a day with the artist. In other cases, he returns to see him five, six, seven times. “I would call, I would watch, I would talk, I would try to understand the artist’s world.” For César, he would even return more than ten times. “César puts on a huge show. He’s constantly in demand. César is perhaps the most public figure, because his showmanship is part of his very being, but he is actually the most reserved, the most secretive. As long as I didn’t have real access to him, I remained on the lookout. One day, finally, he took a small barrel of polyurethane, poured it on the floor, and began to work. That’s what I was waiting for. I had succeeded. For others, on the contrary, a single meeting was enough.” I was trying to make myself as small as possible, to be forgotten. I had no intention of becoming a photographer of artists. There are already a few in Paris who do that job very well, by the way…”.

uring those two years, Hervé Gloaguen didn’t have any photos printed. He waited until he had all the images at once. “If I had done otherwise, I would inevitably have changed my approach, changed my perspective on people.” When I had finished everything, I examined the contacts. One main theme clearly emerged: people’s faces. I hadn’t specifically taken portraits, and yet my work appeared as a gallery of eighty striking faces. With Anne Tronche’s text completed, we created a mock-up of the book and presented it everywhere. Since we didn’t know anyone, we went door-to-door with our mock-up under our arms. We didn’t want to be co-opted by anyone, to play into the hands of the petty mafias of the Parisian art world… It didn’t work out well for us: the model is still gathering dust in our drawers…

PHOTO, July 1972 (translated from French)

This book was finally published in 1973 under the title « L’art actuel en France. Du cinétisme à l’hyperréalisme » (Contemporary Art in France: From Kinetic Art to Hyperrealism)
André Balland Publishers, Preface by Gérald Gassiot-Talabot.