La Recherche photographique

La Recherche photographique: histoire-esthétique was a specialised peer-reviewed bi-annual French journal, published from September 1986 to spring 1997, and edited by Paris Audiovisuel and the University of Paris 8. In 1980, Jean-Luc Monterosso (born in 1947), president of Paris Audiovisuel and founder/director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, and who created the Mois de Photo in Paris and the Grand Prix Paris Match for photojournalism (with Roger Thérond), in 1986 founded the magazine La Recherche photographique with Christian Mayaud of Université Paris VIII. The magazine, like its earlier-established contemporary Les Cahiers de la photographie, emerged in a lively decade for the medium and its critique, breaking with strong traditions of the Beaux Arts in France which had hindered photography's acceptance as a legitimate subject of art historical research until the late 1970s, when the first courses on the history of photography were commenced by Michel Frizot at the University of Dijon and the University Paris-Sorbonne. This late academic attention to the medium (as compared to North America, and other European countries), arriving in the early 1980s, meant that the field of photographic studies in France incorporated perspectives and methodologies outside traditional art history, including semiology (Roland Barthes), sociology (Pierre Bourdieu), and psychoanalysis (François Soulages).