Christian Caujolle

Christian Caujolle (26 February 1953 – 20 October 2025) was a French journalist, photo agent, curator and photographer. He was one of the founders and the artistic director of the Agence VU, as well as the artistic director of the Galerie VU created in 1998. He was the artistic director of the Photo Phnom Penh festival (Cambodia), and of the Château d'Eau gallery in Toulouse.

Life and career Caujolle was born in Sissonne on 26 February 1953. He studied in Toulouse, where a monograph on Jean Dieuzaide introduced him to photography.

He was a student of the École Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud, class of 1974 (Letters - Spanish), and student and collaborator of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu. He was a researcher at the CNRS from 1978 and a contributor to Liberation as a journalist and photography critic, then in 1981 editor-in-chief in charge of photography and produced issues dedicated to Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau.

In 1986 he created Agence VU, a photography agency and after directing the 1997 Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles, was appointed director of the Photographic Gallery VU from 1998. From 2000 he was curator of significant exhibitions and festivals including Foto Biennale in Rotterdam (2000); PHotoEspaña Festival where he presented young Iranian photographers and Thai and Anglo-Saxon photographers based in Bangkok (2001) later presented at the DG Bank collection at the Kunsthalle in Frankfurt; S. and P. Stanikas installation at the Lithuanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2003); Hors Cadre by Gérard Rondeau, at the Grand Palais (Paris) and 50 years of World Press Photo - Things As They Are, photojournalism in context 1955 - 2005, which toured Amsterdam, Tokyo, Paris, and Seoul in 2001; and Phnom Penh Photo Festival (2008). He served on the judging panel for the 2015 Leica Oskar Barnack Award (LOBA).

On 16 November 2020, Christian Caujolle was appointed artistic advisor to the Galerie du Château d'Eau de Toulouse.

On the rise of digital imagery shared via social media in relation to the profession of photography he said;In the world of image in which we are immersed, there are more and more producers of undifferentiated images, who are ultimately equivalent. And it is a popular production, but it has become illegible because of its mass. For this reason, I think that these image producers may not be photographers at all. In fact, I believe that digital imagery is today exactly in the situation in which photography was in its invention: when photography was invented, the only visual references on which it relied were painting, drawing and architecture. Today, digital image producers have as a reference the history of photography. They therefore produce clichés - since they are clichés, stereotypes - that echo pre-existing photographic images. At the same time, and this is one of the very positive aspects of the development of digital technologies, saying today "I am a photographer" is a real choice: it is a very important statement, since it affirms, it defends the fact that the operator has decided to use a technology that involves a certain type of relationship to reality, a certain manufacture of temporality that is totally different.

Caujolle died on 20 October 2025, at the age of 72.

Publications

Awards 2010: Officier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres