[1] This late academic attention to the medium (as compared to North America, and other European countries), arriving in the early 1980s, meant that the field of photographic studies in France incorporated perspectives and methodologies outside traditional art history, including semiology (Roland Barthes),[2][3] sociology (Pierre Bourdieu),[4] and psychoanalysis (François Soulages).
The founding of the journal arose from a meeting in a restaurant on rue Froidevaux in Paris by Claude Nori, Bernard Plossu,[21] Gilles Mora, joined by Denis Roche and Jean-Claude Lemagny.
Les cahiers de la photographie drew on the writings of its founders and others who reflect on photography whether as a central or incidental concern, critics, historians, philosophers and artists from all countries; Anne Baldassari, Angelo Schwarz, Henri Van Lier, André Rouillé, Jean Arrouye, Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, Arnaud Claass, Philippe Dubois, Luigi Ghirri, Alain Fleig, Jacques Clayssen, Alain Desvergnes, Gabriel Bauret, Jean Kempf, Patrick Roegiers.
'); Jean Arrouye: "Le temps d'une photographie" (Time in a photograph); Gabriel Bauret: "Parcours d'une bibliographie" ('Browsing a bibliography'); Micheline Lo: "Suite espagnole n°9; Ernst Haas: "HBC, une vision lyrique du monde" ('HBC, a lyrical vision of the world'); Henri Cartier-Bresson and Gilles Mora: Conversation; and concluding with a letter to Cahiers de la Photographie from Cartier-Bresson.
[22] Symptomatic of a dissolution of interest in photography as a unitary medium in favour of postmodern plurality, and the rise of new and digital media, it was decided to cease after ten years, in 1990.