A Brief History of the "1 Image 1 Minute" Project

This project is a contemporary recreation of Une Image Pour Une Minute, a project originally produced by French director Agnes Varda for presentation on French television in 1983. In Varda's version, a photographic image appeared on television (in-between network programming), and someone--a curator, photographer, or art historian--would speak about the image for one minute.


Here I have asked contemporary photographers, artists, historians, and others to select an image that has significance for them, and write or speak about it for the equivalent of 1 minute. The result is a a compelling and accessible means of gaining insight into other artists’ and photographers’ perspectives. The project is also a way of reactivating photo history, cultural literacy, and of offering a closer look at images than the mere fraction of a second that most contemporary images are afforded.

Marc Karzen


Marc Karzen
Guy Bourdin, Untitled, 1976


A room of control freaks.
Creative control and risk-taking, plagues some of us, maybe all of us...
This is our constant inner struggle and external struggle in our work especially with commercial projects.

Guy Bourdin crossed boundaries, took risks and fortunately found outlets that allowed him to build and grow creatively.
He got his break shooting for French Vogue at age 23.
When I saw Bourdin's work in 1977, I knew I wanted to work with a camera.

He loved big colors, bold lines and shockingly dramatic situations.
This photo has everything. Big and bright, simple, funny, sexy, ridiculous and something never before seen in a shoe ad.
He made shoes objects of desire.
Uniquely, he tricked his models in order to get emotions of shock, horror, laughter and exhaustion.

He put images inside of images which he leaned from his mentor Man Ray.
He paid homage to classic painting as he interwove genres and insane haunting themes through his fashion photographs.
What was most exciting was how he took the sadistic, macabre and unglamorous and made it beautiful or funny.

Control? So determined that his images no be republished, he threw boxes of film into trash cans and lit them on fire.

Guy Bourdin may have been disturbed, but his work is timeless and he influenced a generation of photographers and art directors.
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Micol Hebron