Pol Lujan

Pol Lujan has the humility to present himself as an autodidact. When he tells about his life and his profession as a photographer, he does so without affectation. Avoiding emphasis, he tells the story of thirty years in the business with simplicity. Does he know that by speaking thus, he joins the intuition of one of the greatest, Henri Cartier-Bresson, who considered photography as "an art without art"? Perhaps we should understand in Pol Lujan's elegant attitude the horror, not of art, but of artifice. The world he gives us to see through this globalized pilgrimage unfolds, in fact, without pretense. It is a stubborn quest for authenticity, revealed in all kinds of humanities. From Vietnam to South America, from New York to Paris, his eye in love with the street, his spectacle, balances between the infinitesimal movement of a soul captured in the portrait and the massive movement of a crowd; this globe-trotting eye wanders, strolls, gets carried away, sometimes fogs up - a mist over Manhattan - in contact with the world… It is because Pol Lujan has grown up, since the beginning of the eighties, very young photographer, by confronting the fundamentals of photography. Even this term "fundamentals", it is not certain that the photographer would like to be used in connection with his work. And yet! How better to say the roughness of the years of apprenticeship? Pol Lujan was barely twenty when he left the Parisian suburbs at a time when she was still halfway between the one that humanist photographs had immortalized - Doisneau, Ronis, Boubat - and the one investigated today ' hui the photo-reporters, in times of social war; after a time out, he decides to look for work. Precariousness is not the same as it is today. Classifieds, newspapers. Here he comes to a halt: “We're looking for a filmmaker. To present oneself…". Time blessed by the miracle in which still came out of the newspaper, in three lines and fifteen words, love, meeting or employment! It is a shopkeeper, the owner of a photo store who hires him. He sends him on an adventure, in the streets, like a missionary, to evangelize the invisible crowds, for the greater glory of photography. It thus encages in its case the ordinary man of the twentieth century. He won't stop. Thierry Grillet National Library of France Delegation for cultural dissemination In charge of patronage