Nicolas Bouvier iconographer.
Folio| N° d'inventaire | 23176 |
| Format | 20 x 26.5 |
| Détails | 160 p., publisher's hardcover. |
| Publication | Gollion, 2020 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782884746953 |
Renowned as a travel writer, Nicolas Bouvier (1929-1998) spent most of his life as an iconographer, traveling less to distant roads than to libraries, museums, and archives to unearth images. From the early 1960s to the dawn of the Internet, he played an active role in the growth and recognition of a profession that, for half a century, was an essential link in the production of illustrated publications. This book recalls the importance of this work for the writer, whose services as a documentalist would soon fuel personal editorial projects and an activity as a historian of popular images. The story of his career highlights the major role played by libraries in the preservation and dissemination of images, the visual inventiveness of book clubs and the great illustrated encyclopedias of the 1960s, as well as the liveliness of a Genevan milieu particularly interested in the potential of the reproducible image, around Bouvier, John Berger, Jean Mohr and Jean Starobinski. Documented by a collection of 40,000 pieces preserved at the Centre d'iconographie of the Bibliothèque de Genève, his itinerary allows us to revive what the search for images meant before the arrival of the Internet and to recall the riches this now so everyday gesture could carry within it, to the point of becoming, in his case, a true aesthetic, historical and intellectual project.
Renowned as a travel writer, Nicolas Bouvier (1929-1998) spent most of his life as an iconographer, traveling less to distant roads than to libraries, museums, and archives to unearth images. From the early 1960s to the dawn of the Internet, he played an active role in the growth and recognition of a profession that, for half a century, was an essential link in the production of illustrated publications. This book recalls the importance of this work for the writer, whose services as a documentalist would soon fuel personal editorial projects and an activity as a historian of popular images. The story of his career highlights the major role played by libraries in the preservation and dissemination of images, the visual inventiveness of book clubs and the great illustrated encyclopedias of the 1960s, as well as the liveliness of a Genevan milieu particularly interested in the potential of the reproducible image, around Bouvier, John Berger, Jean Mohr and Jean Starobinski. Documented by a collection of 40,000 pieces preserved at the Centre d'iconographie of the Bibliothèque de Genève, his itinerary allows us to revive what the search for images meant before the arrival of the Internet and to recall the riches this now so everyday gesture could carry within it, to the point of becoming, in his case, a true aesthetic, historical and intellectual project.