Page 42: Luckily, I have an advantage, digital photography, still in its infancy in France.

My portfolio on a Kodak Photo CD surprised the Advertising Agencies who though that I wanted to play music to them!
The magazine “Création Numérique” (Thanks Jeff Tombeur) published a CD-ROM of my digital photos in 1994 and put it in his magazine. A French first! I already had my email address and my website at Compuserve, a great innovation at the time.

Fortunately, there is an American community in Paris, very nice and a free classifieds newspaper, FUSAC, France USA Contacts. I find there friendly meetings organized in pubs in Paris. Not dating sites, like most of the time in France at this time, just for exchanges of ideas, services and know-how, professional or amateur. That's where I met Antoine.

Luckily, Antoine Schneck, photographer and better businessman than me offers a collaboration "L'Atelier Fournier Schneck". Thanks to Antoine's uncle I can rent an apartment. Without any collateral it is impossible to rent in France. The owners demand your last 3 electricity bills, etc… My american papers are chinese to them. Thanks Antoine. Thanks FUSAC.

L'argentique est presque révolu.

Pictured above : Christian Fournier and Antoine Schneck ready to embark on the great digital adventure in 1994. We are, without a doubt, among the few photographers who started with Photoshop 1.0 which at the time fit on a single 3.5-inch floppy disk! It was just a format converter.

At the beginning we squatted in a garage on rue Henri Barbusse 75005 next to a pretty nice guy, Raymond Depardon! Then we shared a studio with a digital-resistant photographer Jean-Michel de Forceville, on rue de Charonne, near Bastille. You know, the transition to digital was hard for older photographers, especially if they’d never had any experience with computers. Little by little, however, we did manage to make him see the advantages of digital photography.

The old Photoshop issue always comes up : "It’s cheating".
Purists will say: "I only shoot in black and white, with just a flash, no digital editing.
My response to that: "Shooting in black and white is already cheating because it doesn’t exist in nature, my eyes only see in colour. If you add the light from a flash, the photograph isn’t natural anymore because you’ve illuminated parts that would normally be too dark to see. That’s also cheating."
This debate just comes down to a question of vocabulary, of rhetoric. No one is really right or wrong.
The KGB were able to make people appear or disappear, in their photos and in reality, very early on.
Even Robert Capa, Doisneau and Henri Cartier Besson, who were all great photographers of renown and skill, admitted having “moved corpses closer to tanks for a better visual impact”, or only “framing the violent part of a scene”, “paying models to pose as more attractive tourists”.
Any photo reportage or text is going to be biased, intentionally or not. There’s no such thing as pure objectivity.
A few years ago at the Palais de la Découverte in Paris, I attended a Perception and Concentration Test. My partner Frédérique, who was sitting right next to me, saw everything. I was taken aback, I did not see reality. This phenomenon is called “Inattentional blindness”. Try it out for yourself on this site: http://www.encyclopedie-incomplete.com/?Test-de-Perception-et-de … just mind-boggling.

Our brain mainly sees what it is interested in. I mean, of course, someone hungry in Paris does not see the streets the same way as a tourist looking to take photos of monuments.
I understood that photography had changed forever when, in 1982, the National Geographic magazine, the Mecca of quality photography, explained that one of the pyramids had been moved so that it fit better within their legendary rectangular frame cover.
http://museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/photo_database/image/the_case_of_the_moving_pyramids/

October 13, 2016 : I met Raymond Depardon for the release for his film "Les Habitants".

I first met Raymond Depardon in 1994 back when Antoine Schneck and I started up the “Atelier Fournier-Schneck”. We were renting out a garage as a photography studio in the court of Raymond’s home on rue Henri Barbusse, 75013.

Raymond Depardon is a French photographer, filmmaker, journalist and screenwriter. He is considered one of the masters of documentary filmmaking. He created the photography agency Gamma in 1966 and has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1979.

Combined ad for Club Med and Schweppes. In collaboration with the Fournier-Schneck Workshop.

If you are offended by photos of somewhat scantily-dressed pretty women, do not scroll to the bottom of this page.

Nudity is not pornography. Respect art. Moderate censorship.

A different era.

The Dalai Lama: "The majority of people who openly say they are offended by the posts of pretty naked girls are usually the ones who secretly watch porn the most."

The hypocrisy of watching sexy photos without respecting the photographers who make these photos.

In 1978, nudity did not shock.



National Geographic (formerly the National Geographic Magazine, sometimes branded as NAT GEO) is the long-lived official monthly magazine of the National Geographic Society. It is one of the most widely read magazines of all time. Topics of features generally concern science, geography, history, and world culture. The magazine is well known for its distinctive appearance: a thick square-bound glossy format with a yellow rectangular border and its use of dramatic photography. The magazine is published monthly. Additional map supplements are also included with subscriptions. It is available in a traditional printed edition and through an interactive online edition. National Geographic been published continuously since 1888, nine months after the foundation of the Society itself.
It's the Mecca of every photographer

Le billet de 100 Francs = Une Femen sur nos billets

Émission de 1990 à 1993 (trois années d'émission). Retrait de la circulation le 1er février 1999

Recto : Portrait d'Eugène Delacroix au centre avec palette et pinceaux. À droite, détail du tableau « Le Liberté guidant le peuple ». Au-dessus du numéro : trois points noirs en relief pour les non-voyants
Verso : Buste de Delacroix, une plume d'oie à la main. Au fond, la place Furstenberg à Paris, sur laquelle s'ouvrait l'atelier du peintre
Filigrane : Portrait de Delacroix, dans rectangle blanc

Graveurs : Renaud (recto), Jubert (verso), Combet (taille-douce)
Dessinateur : Fontanarosa

Signatures : Le secrétaire général, le contrôleur général, le caissier général (quatre combinaisons de signataires)
Alphabets : 135 à 256, numéro à six chiffres