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people rushed in from the surrounding area, determined to witness the liberation of the capital with their own eyes. In Simone de Beauvoir's published journal, for example, she recounts bicycling more than forty miles from Neuilly-sous-Clermont with Jean-Paul Sartre. "[W]e pedaled along feverishly," she wrote, "gripped by the sudden fear of finding ourselves cut off from Paris: we had no wish to miss the actual Liberation." 2 Photographers, too, flocked to the scene, and in the aftermath of that August week, the circulation of pictures of the events would help communicate some of the excitement felt by de Beauvoir and thousands like her to those who had missed it. Between 1944 and 1946, far more, in fact, would witness the Liberation as a spectacle of images than had experienced it firsthand. They packed cinemas to see the film La Libe ´ration de Paris, which showed first in Paris in 1944, and then all over the nation. 3 That winter, Parisians and visitors relived the August days at a photo exhibition at the Muse ´e Carnavalet, the city's history museum. And the French (as well as American and British) public ea-Generous support from MIT and the University of Southern California as well as a 2009-2010 Bourse Chateaubriand from the French Embassy in the United States helped make research for this article possible. Catherine Tambrun, Jean-Baptiste Woloch, and the staff of the Muse ´e Carnavalet facilitated my access to documents about the 1944 exhibition.

This article examines the history of the commercial street photographer, or photofilmeur, in France from 1945 to 1955. Although itinerant photographers had long operated, they organized as a new profession after the Second World War in response to hostile reactions from other ‘sedentary’ photographers, conservative officials, lawmakers, and the police. Tracing the fight to regulate and even ban photofilmeurs in state and police archives, courtroom accounts, and union publications, this article reveals a struggle over the who, what, and where of photography: Who has the right to photograph whom? Can you take pictures of people without their consent? What is professional photography? Answers to these questions recast the history of street photography not as an aesthetic category, as most scholarship treats it, but in terms of the medium’s engagement with the law and issues of consent, intent, copyright, privacy, and dissemination that are at the heart of 20th and 21st-century photographic history.

This article looks at two seemingly disparate events: Georges Pompidou’s 1973 presidential visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the filming and release of Jean Yanne’s blockbuster comedy Les Chinois à Paris (1974). Both produced flawed visions of Franco-Chinese relations. During Pompidou’s visit, officials and the press attempted to demonstrate that France enjoyed warmer relations with the PRC than any other Western nation. Yanne’s film parodied the French fad for Maoism by imagining the People’s Liberation Army invading and occupying Paris. His film caused an uproar in the press and sparked official Chinese protest. The article ultimately argues that the two events were deeply related, part of a wave of popular and official interest in China in the early 1970s that extended well beyond the well-known stories of student and intellectual Maoists. This interest paved the way for Franco-Chinese relations as we know them today.

In 1970, a new generation of municipal officials worked with the FNAC, a camera and electronics store that was also a major player on the French cultural scene, to organize an enormous amateur photo contest to document the French capital. Called “C’était Paris en 1970,” this competition asked participants to produce a comprehensive archive of Paris during the month of May. Their submissions provide remarkable access to how their makers understood older photographs as historical documents, how they imagined photography could picture the passage of time, and how, in turn, they imagined their own photos might one day be seen. These photos help take stock of how a century of photographic production, collection, and circulation had influenced the historical imagination.