Diane Dufour

Diane Dufour is the founder, in 2008 in Paris, of LE BAL, a centre for the contemporary image and visual literacy. The exhibitions she has curated and, often, co-curated (Anonymes: Unnamed America in Photography and Film (2010) with David Campany; Topography of War (2011) with Jean-Yves Jouannais; Images of Conviction (2015) with Eyal Weizman; Reversing the Eye – Arte Povera and Beyond (2022) with Quentin Bajac and Giuliano Segio, among others) have garnered international recognition for LE BAL. Diane Dufour is especially interested in twentieth-century Japanese photography and has curated a number of exhibitions, including Tokyo-E, Three Generations of Japanese Photographers: Watake, Takanashi, Kitajima (2011); Provoke: between Protest and Performance (2016) and Yasuhiro Ishimoto – Lines and Bodies (2024), that have helped introduce Japanese photography to European audiences. Many emerging talents, the likes of Mohamed Bourouissa, Clement Cogitore, Noémie Goudal, Joanna Piotrowska, Marie Quéau, Hannah Darabi, Eric Minh Cuong Castaing and Yasmina Benabderrahmane, have benefitted from her support.

Japanese photography is celebrated worldwide yet the broader public is unfamiliar with one of its fundamental aspects: the printed page and, specifically, high-circulation illustrated press: a major platform for experimental visual creation in the post-war years. During this key period for modern Japan, the page, rather than the wall, proved the ideal medium for addressing subjects that can surprise a contemporary viewer. The intimate body, the political body, the marginal body: Diane Dufour’s research will focus on all these manifestations of desire, violence and transgression, guided by multiple interrogations: what do these images really express? What processes and authorities enabled their diffusion? What controversies did they spark? How was the image’s creation shaped in part by the medium of the printed page? In collaboration with Ivan Vartanian, a Japanese-speaking curator in Tokyo.