In images, in picturesIn the 1960s and 1970s, six photographers from the Heurtier agency in Rennes took X-rays of the functional and depersonalized premises of a rapidly developing tertiary sector. A selection of prints is on display outdoors until June 20 in Nogent-sur-Oise.
It’s an anthology scene from the movie Playtime by jacques tati: Mr. Hulot, an unrepentant blunderer resistant to standards, gets lost in the maze of identical offices of a large company. It’s impossible not to think about the 1967 film and the filmmaker’s smirk when looking at the photos from the Heurtier collection, exhibited at the Usimages industrial heritage photography biennial, organized until June 20 by the Creil Sud urban community. Oise (ACSO).
Crazy about photography and aviation, Bernard Heurtier, accountant by profession, founded in 1961 in Rennes an agency of “Industrial, aerial, decorative and advertising photography in black and color”. As his slogan indicates, the “gunner operators” he hires have no artistic ambition. Fast, precise and rigorous, they handle the 13 × 18 cm format chambers like no one else. For almost two decades, until 1976, these conscientious technicians crisscrossed the Great West to document the development of the tertiary sector and industrial sites, thus responding to the orders of the insurance company MAAF, the regional agency of Credit Agricole. like the tax department.
A company in working order
All of the 27,000 prints and negatives kept by the Musée de Bretagne in Rennes provide a precious snapshot of rural regions undergoing economic change. In hollow, also appears an outdated X-ray of France at work during the “glorious thirties”, when unprecedented economic growth awakened, as a consequence, furious desires for individual emancipation.
A visit to these offices is the reverse image of the yéyés and BB’s little gingham dress. Here, the shorthands and their wise styling facing the little chef. Further on, the switchboard operators lined up as if on parade. The receptionist welcomes; archivists in work coats hardly have time to smile behind their glasses. Tipping France over to modernity is serious business.
Everyone in their place, especially women, programmed to excel in subordinate roles – “An advance despite everything at a time when so many of them remained confined to the home”, however recalls Laurence Prod’homme, curator at the Musée de Bretagne. In the images, they assist the ties who decide, take note of the employers’ thoughts. Subordination is marked in attitudes, but also in objects. Attaché cases for some, typewriters for others. For decision-makers, individual, soberly impersonal offices. For the performers, the collective spaces animated by the clicking of the keyboards. In this world, that of employees, transversality and autonomy are not on the program of social conquests.
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