1 - Angels of History: Looking Back at Spatial Planning in the Mission photographique de la DATAR

Summary

In 1983, the DATAR turned 20. Reporting directly to the French prime minister, the task of the Délégation à l’aménagement du territoire et à l’action régionale had been to coordinate spatial planning and the development of infrastructure across France's national territory. Its creation in 1963 reflected president Charles de Gaulle's determination to modernise, reinvigorate, and reorient the country as it entered the postcolonial period signalled by Algerian independence in 1962. Two decades later, the DATAR decided to mark its anniversary with a photography project that would record how the country had been transformed by concerted state-led action. Bernard Latarjet, one of the agency's senior civil servants, teamed up with visual artist François Hers to commission 28 photographers, some well known and many much less so (Hers himself would also take part, bringing the total number involved to 29). Fanning out across the country to capture the state of the nation, they worked in the field for between two and three years. Together, they produced around 16,000 contact sheets and 2,000 images, which were archived for posterity in the French national library.

The Mission photographique de la DATAR was one of France's most ambitious photography projects of the twentieth century. Its title was a deliberate echo of nineteenth-century photographic missions, such as the Mission héliographique of 1851, which embraced the documentary and scientific qualities of objectivity invested in the new medium to create inventories of buildings, places, and people. It also recalled international antecedents such as the Farm Security Administration's photographic survey of rural communities in the Depression-era United States. Like the FSA project, the Mission photographique was all the more distinctive for being initiated and financed not by a cultural institution or ministry, but by a state agency whose primary remit was technical and administrative. Informed by the prospective thinking in vogue in the 1960s, the aim of state planning was to produce a country whose economy and infrastructure were geared towards the imagined requirements and challenges of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As Hers and Latarjet (1989) suggest in their account of the project, the DATAR was conscious of both the impact of its activities and the difficulty of grasping them in their totality across French territory as a whole. By covering the country, the mission's photographers could begin to get a feel for how it had been transformed.