Audrey Leblanc is a historian of photography, research associate at the EHESS (Paris). She is currently researcher for the collaborative project Photo-Fribourg (Switzerland, 2023-27) and Fellow at the Harry Ransom Center (USA, 2025). She has curated two exhibitions on press photography and edited the catalogues (French National Library (BnF), 2018). Her research explores the cultural history of image producers from the 1960s to the 1980s, through an archival perspective.
Research interests:
My phd in history entitled ‘L'image de Mai 68 : du journalisme à l'histoire’ (EHESS, Paris, 2015), was partly promoted in the form of an exhibition at the BnF in 2018: I curated it and edited the catalogue. This curatorial experience was repeated with La contemporaine-Nanterre université, focusing on the 1960s-90s independent press photographer Elie Kagan (January-May 2022). I am working on a social and cultural history of image producers and my research focuses on the use of image collections as a factor in the circulation of narratives, values and/or social conventions: analysis of indexing systems and their impact on structuring what is visible and the (in)visibility they generate; mapping of representations by photo libraries; intermedia circulation of images and development of a Western visual culture of news in the 1960s-80s (agencies and TV). The material description of the collections as a prerequisite for a history of the representations they structure has led me to work on the preservation and conservation of these collections, from the 1960s to the digital age. Reflection on the management of image collections is also fed by a socio-historical investigation into the professions - invisibilised and gendered - involved in documenting these collections (iconographer, librarians, archivist, documentalist).
