Exhibition "Industry... and afterwards?"

This exhibition’s origins lie in the mutual desire to work together of Contretype in Brussels and the Hauts-de-France Regional Photography Centre (CRP/) at Douchy-les-Mines.

As soon as I had been given the assignment to curate an exhibition covering all parts of the CRP/’s vast collection of almost 9,000 images, the question of de-industrialisation quickly moved to the forefront, because not only did many of the images make reference to this problem, but also the CRP/’s home region had been profoundly marked by it; indeed, in my opinion, it gives the CRP/ its specificity.

This approach also involved cross-border similarities, common to the two neighbouring regions of the Hauts-de-France (formerly the Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Picardie regions) and Wallonia: an industrial past and a present marked by de-industrialisation. This phenomenon is not restricted to the coal-mining industry in these regions, but extends further, beyond their borders, to all the industries that flourished in Europe in the nineteenth century and that were breathing their last in the 1960s.
The 1980s saw the collapse of jobs in industry, as the effects of foreign competition devastated the European industrial sector, in favour of jobs in commerce and services, a process we call de-industrialisation.

It is this common thread of the dismantling of industry in North-Eastern France and South-Eastern Belgium from the 1980s to today that this exhibition will follow, touching also on representations of a sort of re-industrialisation, in new sectors. Far from concentrating solely on images of the effects of de-industrialisation on the economy and the landscape, the images we have chosen from the CRP/’s collection, by seven photographers : Claire Chevrier, Jean-Pierre Gilson, Marc Pataut, Bernard Plossu, Jorge Ribalta, Michel Séméniako and Valentine Solignac also focus on its effect on people.

Danielle Leenaerts
Curator