Françoise Huguier inspires Visa pour l’image

Her fellow photographers and friends say she has “scanner eyes”. “In the street, on the beach, anywhere, there is always something that catches my eye, does she recognize. I pass, I come back, I stop, I do the framing in my head, I record everything and I only take the photo afterwards. »

At 80 years, sixty of whom are constantly on the move, Françoise Huguier has scoured the planet, from Mali to Indonesia, from Greater Paris to Siberia, without ever losing this art of focusing on the detail that no one sees, of capturing the grace under the filth. Escaping all the boxes, she put the same passion into covering fashion shows for Release only to create the now unavoidable Bamako Meetings devoted to photography.

When an editor is worried about a subject deemed “too hard” for a woman, she replies: “You know, it’s not very complicated, you just have to press a button! »

The beauty of a cracked pane, the worry of a look, and this phone that definitely doesn’t ring: she has her little tricks to capture the intimate in the strangers she meets. “When I arrive at people’s homes, I don’t take pictures right away. I sit down, I have a coffee, I go to the bathroom. And, there, I discover a detail, wallpaper, the photo of a little boy. This is where the conversation starts, she says from her vacation in Brittany. I spend time with people: more than the image, it’s their story that interests me. »

The method allowed him to penetrate the secret rooms of the women of Mali, the intimacy of Ile-de-France families as part of an order for Greater Paris or to capture the poetry of the community apartments of St. Petersburg. “Being a woman also helped me a lot to approach people in their intimacy. And not only that of women: I even have a photo of a man in his shower! »

Inspired by cinema

“Curious, stubborn and rude”so she defines herself with humor, “and believe me, it’s very useful in this job”. Never, without these three assets, would she have been able to impose her gaze in an almost exclusively male world when she started in the 1960s. judge ” too hard “ for a woman.

“I told him that nothing was too hard, after what I had been through when I was 8 years old”, she remembers. Allusion to the eight months she spent in detention in Indochina, after being kidnapped by Vietminh fighters in the rubber plantation run by her father, an episode she recounted in her book I was eight years old (Editions Actes Sud). “And then I added: ‘You know, it’s not very complicated, you just have to press a button!’ »

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