Exhibitions

TURBULENT AMERICA

Miami, FL. August 23rd 1972. Outside of the 1972 30th Republican Convention, during President Richard Nixon's reelection campaign, demonstrators wearing costumes and makeup perform scenes of death and suffering in opposition to the Vietnam War. Several thousand Women's Lib protesters led by Jane Fonda, having just returned from her North Vietnam tour, and the Vietnam Veterans also protested. No clashes with police were reported.

From the exhibition: Protestor outside the 1972 Republican National Convention, Miami, FL.

TURBULENT  AMERICA  presents  three  decades  of  work  by  photojournalist  Jean-Pierre  Laffont  covering  American  culture  and  history  from  the  1960s  to  the  1980s.

Jean-Pierre Laffont has always been a free spirit and a gifted, singular photographer, loyal to his own insatiable curiosity and uninterested in assignments. He sought to tell the stories of his era with a tender and compassionate gaze. Upon arrival in the United States in 1965, he quickly became a privileged witness to a nation embroiled in controversy and for three decades photographed its political, social and cultural mutations, observed the fate of its leaders and documented the tragic divisions of its civilization. This Turbulent America is above all his: brimming with spontaneity and humanity. In the intense canvas he paints for us, we find an abundance of the events that left their marks from the 60s to the 90s; the heroes and heroines; the captivating parade of social outcasts and fanatics, and the daily life of a people who live by the rhythm of their country’s failures and its moments of euphoria, harsh as well as  liberating. Today, his photographic odysseys, filled with iconic images, bring history back to vibrant life in the form of a personal archive of events, which helped chisel the  multiple facets of his adopted homeland.
– Jonas Cuénin

AMERICA AS I LIVED IT

“I was born French in Algeria, grew up in Morocco, and studied photography in Switzerland, before finding work as a photographer of movie stars in Paris. What I wanted to be, however, was a photojournalist and it was the United States that fascinated me. I arrived in New York in 1965 and for more than 3 decades, I traveled trough the country trying to capture the spirit of the times. In the Sixties, New York was dirty and dangerous. The country was going through profound changes and it looked like everyone was in the streets protesting. In the Seventies, the American dream seemed to be disintegrating. The American people no longer trusted their government. I covered the rise of the Black power movement and the Ku Klux Klan. During President Carter’s years, I did photo essays with the poor in his home state of Georgia. The American spirit was down. Still, the war in Vietnam had ended and through the hippie movement, the American youth found its voice and optimism. In the Eighties, Americans were ready for a new beginning. When I look back at the individual photographs I took during this quarter-century period, the images at first seem to depict a ball of confusion… riots, demonstrations, disintegration, collapse and conflict. Taken together, the images show the chaotic, often painful, birth of the country where we live in today: 21st-century America. They do what photographs do best: freeze decisive moments in time for future examination. These photographs form a personal and historical portrait of a country I have always viewed critically but affectionately, and to which I bear immense gratitude.”
-Jean-Pierre Laffont

SPECIFICS

The show includes 118 images ranging in size from 20.5×30.5cm (8″x12″) to 180.5×120.5cm (71″x47.4″).

VENUE LIST

Mestre, Italy. 

Centro Culturale Candiani

“Jean Pierre Laffont Turbulent America”

February 16th – May 30th, 2019

New York City, USA. 

Leica Store NY

“Jean Pierre Laffont New York Down and Out”

November 8th – December 31st, 2018

Shanghai, CHINA. 

Beaugeste Gallery

“Laffont’s Long March”

June 30th – September 30th, 2018

Shenzhen, CHINA

“New York Up & Down”

Shenzhen Photo Festival

June 20th – June 23th, 2018

New York City, USA

Turbulent America

Sous Les Etoiles Gallery

November 16th, 2017 – February 10th, 2018

Merignac, France

Amérique: Mythes et Légendes

Eglise Saint-Vincent

November 19th, 2016 – January 22, 2017

Metz, France

Tumultueuse Amerique

Musee de L’Arsenal

September 27, 2016 – November 27, 2016

China

Pingyao International Photography Festival, China

September 2016

Lille, France

Tri Postal

June 4th-July 31st 2016

Moscow, Russia

Moscow Photo Biennale

Central Exhibition Hall Manege

February 17, 2016 – March 17, 2016

Paris, France

Maison Européenne de la Photographie

September 09, 2015 – October 31, 2015

Florida, USA

Royal Palm Beach

Fotofusion, Cultural Center

January 22, 2015

New York City, USA

Clic Gallery

October 9, 2014

New York City, USA

Albertine Bookstore

December 4, 2014

Perpignan, France

Visa pour l’Image

Campo Santo

September 2014

PUBLICATION

The book cover for "Photographer's Paradise" by Jean-Pierre Laffont.

Photographer’s Paradise: Turbulent America 1960-1990, Jean-Pierre Laffont / Foreword by Sir Harold Evans / Edited by Eliane Laffont Published by Glitterati Incorporated, 2014. 392 pages; 10×13 1/2″ hardcover with 2 gatefolds; 359 photos

PRESS QUOTES

“Jean-Pierre Laffont’s America is a land of poverty, corporate greed, racism and violence. But it is also a land of optimism where hard work, sheer will and following your dream can lead to almost anything. It is so vast that it can contain both the quiet desperation of fifth-generation farmers struggling to remain on their family land and the hopes of a new immigrant searching for a better life.”
New York Times

“Laffont joined the long tradition, beginning with de Toqueville, of Frenchmen who were able to see what it was.”
New York Magazine

“Even if you are familiar with the best photojournalism of that time, Laffont’s eye for the surreal and the surprising is almost uncanny. (…) As his turbulent America unfolds, you see a singular vision emerge: fearless and darkly poetic.”
The Guardian

“Jean-Pierre Laffont’s extensive photo archive seems almost mythological: How could one photographer cover so many seminal events with such a unique vision?”
Slate

“Through Laffont’s lens we see the emergence of a brave new world, one that allows the youth to follow their dreams, for better or for worse. The result is a remarkable monograph that is a work of significant art history, revealing an astonishing breadth, detail, and scope as profound and compelling as the man who took the photographs himself.”
Crave

“Paging through Photographer’s Paradise is like watching a nation grow and crumble under its own weight. His images record the vast diversity of communities, societies, and often people on the fringes of those groups. Laffont’s photojournalism becomes a historical record of the times.”
Advocate

“Laffont might just be the greatest photojournalist you’ve never heard of. The Algerian-born Frenchman covered nearly every story of importance in America during the transformative decades of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s with provocative clarity, intellectual honesty and emotional resonance.”
Black & White Magazine

“There’s spiritual balm in the images of what Laffont calls the rural crisis. His poignant pictures are reminiscent of the fortitude and grace immortalized in Dorothea Lange’s images of the Great Depression.”
– Sir Harold Evans, from the foreword of Photographer’s Paradise: Turbulent America 1960-1990