The ministries of regional planning and ecological transition organized for their 80th anniversary a competition of urban photos. The key to the participants? Visibility, but no more. Free work, denounce photographers.
Reconstruction of Le Havre, in 1955. The competition proposed to take pictures according to the same angle as the images of the reconstruction of France captured from 1944 to 1958. Keystone France
By Marie-Anne Kleiber
Posted on April 23, 2025 at 3:34 p.m.
PHotographing the same urban landscape, but decades of distance: the result is often surprising. Also, the idea of celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Ministry of Reconstruction and Town Planning, founded in 1944-now divided between the Ministry of Spatial Planning and Decentralization and that of the Ecological Transition-, thanks to photos playing on the forefront seems good on paper. As part of a competition, the two ministries therefore proposed to amateur and professional photographers to take, by showing creativity, clichés according to the same angle as images dating from 1944 to 1958 captured throughout France. So many ancient shots which document the reconstruction of the country after the war, whether it be the place of 8-May-1945 at La Courneuve (93), brick dwellings Place Jean-Bart in Dunkirk (59) or the Recouvrance bridge in Brest (29).
Renounce copyright for ten years
The works of the first ten winners will be revealed at the end of this competition, at the end of May 2025, and exhibited in a ministerial building. The first three will be published in the specialized magazine Fisheye. And ? Nothing more. The winners will even have to renounce their copyright for ten years and will not receive anything on publications as part of the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the Ministry of Reconstruction and Town Planning. However, the State does not envisage “no commercial exploitation of these photos”, authorizing the photographers to sell their shots elsewhere.
The CLAP, the liaison and action committee for photography, an association founded in 2018 and bringing together several agencies and collectives of photographers, denounces “Free work”. “We are typically in a configuration where the two ministries could have placed an order to photographers who would have been paid, but they preferred to launch a competition which does not cost much and whose reward is simply visibility, We protest in the committee. No ministry would ask a musician to make a free concert or an artist to paint a painting without being paid! »»
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“This is a photo competition in particular turned towards amateurs”, The Ministry of Ecological Transition is justified, which emphasizes that the publication of winning photos in a professional magazine “In this context is a very rewarding reward”. Rest that “The copyright of photographers are less and less respected”, As the CLAP deplores, while the profession is more and more precarious. The association published in 2023 a study on the standard of living of professional photographers. It reveals that 60 % of them earn less than 20,000 euros per year.
