Viewfinder: Femme Tondue, 1944 - Telegraph

Viewfinder: Femme Tondue, 1944
A woman believed to have slept with German soldiers has her head shaved
Serena Davies
12:01AM BST 17 May 2004
At last, London has an art fair that gives photography the chance to make an impact, says
Serena Davies
Photo-London arrives next week: London's first international photography fair, one to rival Paris
Photo and Aipad in New York, and to make some amends for the paucity of photographic galleries in
our metropolis.
The fair, showing in the Royal Academy's Burlington Gardens, will have 50 stands taken not only by
photographic specialists, but also by world-class fine art galleries - among them the transatlantic
Gagosian and London's White Cube.
On sale are photographers who make art - Julia Margaret Cameron, Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe and artists who make photographs - Cindy Sherman, Sam Taylor Wood, and, latest darling of the
dealers, Andreas Gursky.
But photography is not solely a subsection of the art world. In the work of photojournalism and that of
the unsung man or woman who captured a fleeting moment with a camera, it plays a separate role.
Such images aspire towards objective representation, something in which the rest of fine art has lost
interest.
Photo-London represents these with the heavyweight Getty Images, owner of the largest
photojournalism collection in the world, and a bevy of small dealers who spend their lives scanning
the car boot sales of the world for photographic gems.
One such is Serge Plantureux, who found an image in a Paris flea market. It shows a woman having
her head shaved in a French village in the aftermath of the Liberation, a punishment for those believed
to have slept with occupying German soldiers - "horizontal collaborationists" as they were named.
The great war photographer Robert Capa captured a similar scene, but in this case we know nothing of
the photographer save his name, A Noel - and neither does it matter. The picture's import lies instead
in its record of the moment - most startlingly the grinning faces that greet this ritual humiliation.
Such pictures present us with universal human truths: in this case, all too apposite an insight into
human beings' bizarre capacity to find degradation amusing in the moral chaos war engenders.
Another salutary reminder of photography's unique role in our society.
Photo-London, May 20-23, at Burlington Gardens, The Royal Academy, 0870 1451154.
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