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Lettrists & Photography (OEI #106–107)

OEI #106-107: Lettrists & Photography 336 pages, 2025, Frédéric Acquaviva (Ed.)

OEI #106-107: Lettrists & Photography is, which is indeed a remarkable fact, the first large-scale synthesis of Lettrist photography as a precise ‘system’. And not least given the often stunning - visual and conceptual - intensity of many of these innovative works, which haven’t lost their relevance and still haven’t received the attention they would merit.

OEI #106-107: Lettrists & Photography presents the universe of the Lettrist movement’s engagement with photography from the 1950s up until 2013 in three encompassing chapters written by Frédéric Acquaviva. It reproduces around 430 photographic works and documents, and also includes English translations of texts by and interviews with Isidore Isou, Maurice Lemaître and Frédérique Devaux.

“The first phase was to call photography into question. Through scratches and tears, the surface of the image was worked on, transformed within itself. This is the chiselling stage. Then we propose Lettrist photography, which transforms the old object into a letter or sign, redefining it as a simple particle in a system of elements that has become the alphabet of a new script. Hypergraphic photography goes even further, using any sign or graphic design to create a poly-writing system resulting in billions of characters, existing, artificial or new. Going even further, in 1956 our movement introduced infinitesimal photography, creating works composed of elements that exist only insofar as they allow us to imagine other elements, non-existent or possible. Each element must make us think of other elements. Infinitesimal photography is made up of billions of pieces of virtual data! Then, in 1960, the Lettrist movement unveiled a new dimension: supertemporal photography. With supertemporal photography, I offer a framework within which each viewer can act in his or her own way. Far superior to today’s happenings it has no time limit. The image is forever open to new amateurs who erase or continue what has already been done on the photograph by previous amateurs. It’s a work that has been going on for centuries! This is our creation in photography. […] We amuse ourselves at the level at which things are done, and we see them twenty years ahead of time. To say that Lettrist photography doesn’t exist is to say that no photograph exists …” (Isidore Isou, 1973)