Remembering Christian Caujolle, a seminal figure in French photography, who has died aged 72

""Photographers are a different breed of human being," Christian Caujolle once said. "Not the ones who are producers of images but those who are able to propose a different point of view. The ones whose perspective is not about reproduction but interpretation, using such a strange and specific tool as photography. And always with a tension between realism and fantasy.""

""My passion for photography probably comes from the fact that, when I was a child, I had no access at all to visual culture," Caujolle once said. "It has fuelled me with curiosity.""

Christian Caujolle was a seminal figure in French photography whose work shaped global perceptions of the medium. He founded Agence Vu and later a gallery, served as a critic and photography director at a leading French newspaper, and worked as a prolific writer and curator committed to asserting photographers as auteurs. He energetically supported young talent while emphasizing photography as interpretation rather than mere reproduction, balancing realism and fantasy. He grew up on a grandparents' farm in southwest France, studied in Toulouse, encountered Jean Dieuzaide, studied modern literature at the École Normale Supérieure, and collaborated with intellectuals including Foucault, Barthes and Bourdieu.

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