Elise Voyau, winner of the Chancellery of Universities of Paris 2024 thesis prize

Postdoctoral fellow at Tokyo Foreign Language University, Élise Voyau specializes in the history of photography in Japan. After studying art history at the École du Louvre and Japanese studies at the Université Paris Cité, she specialized in Japanese photography and began a doctorate at Inalco under the supervision of Michael Lucken. After research stays at Tokyo University and Waseda University, she taught at Inalco for two years as a temporary teaching and research associate (ATER).

Her thesis was also awarded the Shibusawa Claudel Prize 2024 last July.

"Photographs for sale!" Redefining radicalism in photography after 1968, the Japanese case of Workshop shashin gakkō (1974-1976)

The subject under study in this thesis is the independent photography school Workshop, founded in Tokyo in 1974 by six photographers, who are today among the best-known on the Japanese scene: Tōmatsu Shōmei, Moriyama Daidō, Araki Nobuyoshi, Hosoe Eikō, Fukase Masahisa and Yokosuka Noriaki. Analysis of these photographers' work over their shared period of activity, but also of the theoretical texts produced around these works, sheds new light on the post-1968 artistic landscape. Workshop shows that, after the end of the protest movements, which were seen as a failure, the 1970s were a time of fierce experimentation and negotiation. Indeed, while Japanese photography is best known for its printed output (books and magazines), Workshop's photographers stand out for their exhibition activities. In 1976, they organized the "Photographs for Sale" exhibition, which promoted the development of the market for original prints, in order to bring photography into the contemporary art market. This initiative met with virulent criticism from the heirs of the protest left. They accused Workshop photographers of abandoning a form of Japanese-style radicalism, which they had helped to develop in the 1960s. In these debates, photography then embodied a tension between, on the one hand, the theories that had invested it with the power to subvert notions of the work and the original, and on the other, a model of the art market imported from the USA, which artists ended up adopting as an inevitable compromise.

Each year, the Chancellerie des universités de Paris awards prizes from the proceeds of donations and bequests made to the former University of Paris or certain higher education establishments in the Île-de-France region. These prizes are awarded to doctors in recognition of their academic and scientific excellence and merit.

Chancellerie des universités de Paris.