Cartier-Bresson's talent obliterated the boundary between art and documentary photography. He was one of the founders of the Magnum agency, which turned photo-journalism into an art form, recording the great historical conflicts and documenting the social, political and private spheres of human existence.

William Klein has always refused to obey the rules. His consistently experimental work as a painter, film-maker, graphic artist and fashion photographer jolts us out of our cosy viewing habits. Klein uses the camera lens to set up a confrontational encounter with his subject. As Alain Jouffroy puts it, "For Klein, the act of photographing is physical as much as artistic. Photography should be like a shock of sensual, violent energy."

Raymond Depardon rocked the foundations of documentary photography and photo-journalism by turning the photograph into a violent confrontation between reality and the subjectivity of the photographer. In 1966, Raymond Depardon co-founded the Gamma agency. He was soon to rock the foundations of documentary photography and photo-journalism by turning the photograph into a violent confrontation between reality and the subjectivity of the photographer.
As he shows us his pictures of the asylum of San Clemente, Raymond Depardon talks about the photographer as curious bystander, as professional voyeur. These contact-sheets highlight the ambiguity of the role of the photographer, now and then turning out a good photograph - one you can look at without feeling ashamed.

Famous chiefly for his photo-reportages of the events in Prague in 1968 and his pictures of the gypsies he lives with, Koudelka is a man who cannot stop looking. He refuses to talk about his strong, tragic pictures, saying "I'm a photographer: I'm no good at talking. If I've got something to say, that's what my photographs are there for."

From the late 1930s onwards, the streets of Paris and its suburbs were Doisneau's favourite subject. His images of the Liberation of Paris in 1944 and his famous picture The Kiss (Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville) have travelled all over the world. His contact-sheets - with humorous comments from Doisneau himself - add up to a chronicle of the twentieth century, a linear memoir of the photographer's time and place.

A tireless traveller since the Fifties, quietly humorous and always on the look-out for precious moments, Édouard Boubat has done spreads for all the big photographic magazines. "I don't ask myself whether a photograph is good or bad. What's important is that there should be some kind of energy."

Magnum reporter Elliott Erwitt is a photographer with a sense of humour. He captures coincidences in a way that is totally unique. Dogs are his favourite target, and over the years they have become a metaphor for everything that is trivial, shouldering all the petty burdens of the world.

International newspaper photographer Marc Riboud has travelled the world and amassed forty years' worth of photographs, making a special study of India and China. But one of his most famous photographs is a picture taken in Washington in 1968, at a demonstration against the Vietnam War, of a girl holding up a flower in front of the guns.

As Leonard Freed sees it, being a professional photographer should be either fun or profitable - or an alternative to psychotherapy. End-prints have a life of their own, but contact-sheets are to look at and keep: Freed uses his contact-sheets to keep track of time.

Born in Italy in 1925. Taking pictures of hospices, earth-bound life and landscape in order to challenge time.

Born in Germany in 1920. Star photographer of European and American glossy magazines renouned for his provocative images of women and fashion.

Born in Great Britain in 1935. His war photographs have laid a landmark in the international press.

Sophie Calle is a visual artist, photographer, writer and director. His job is to make his life, especially the most intimate moments, his work using all possible media (books, photos, videos, films, performances...).

For the first time in thirteen minutes of a monologue of raw truth, Nan Goldin tells herself in “Contacts” what binds her to her images.

A fashion and advertising photographer since 1968, she very quickly won praise and prizes in Paris, London, New York and Tokyo, where her exhibitions were highly acclaimed.

The city, the women, the sky and the flowers seen by the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki.

After studying economics at Rikkyo Saint-Paul's University in Tokyo, Sugimoto left Japan in 1970 to study photography at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles.

The exhibition "Photography in Düsseldorf" traces the history of German photographic objectivity from the 1970s to the present day.

One of the leaders of a new German generation. Ruff uses the photographic medium in a documentary and objective way, in large color formats.

A resolutely modern photographic art.

Focus on industrial society and its evolution since the end of the 1960s.

The first photos of the artist date from 1974. He treats his prints like paintings.

Alain Fleischer expresses his taste for duplication and multiple experiments in his photographic work with very elaborate devices.

"What will be the image that will remain?" is the leitmotif of Christian Boltanski's photographic work.

A journey through post-war industrial landscapes and new objective photography.

A student at San Diego State College from 1949 to 1957, John Baldessari produced paintings attempting to establish a relationship between painting and language.

Georges Rousse or a different investigation of space, tracing hieroglyphic writing on the walls and floors.

Born in Great Britain in 1952. Focusing on the blemishes of Western society, Martin Parr's lens takes aim at hyper-consumerism, packaged leisure and boredom in a derisive slant on our ways of life. His work deciphers social codes using a particularly subversive rule: lucidity is inseparable from humour.

Born in the United States in 1955. Roni Horn's journey in photography is that of a highly unusual initiation. It takes its source in graphic design, explores sculpture, questions writing, then returns to the essential: the subtle grammar of signs and images, Iceland is his subject of predilection, the entry point into his relationship with the world as well as the metaphor of her work: life is made of cycles in which time, nature, death, the visible and invisible call and answer each other.

Born in Germany in 1954. Struth strips bare the structures of our cities, lives and dreams. His photographs reveal the relationship between urban space, social group and the representation of the sub-conscious.

Born in Germany in 1968. Abstracts, portraits, landscapes or still lives, Wolfgang Tillmans engages every traditional photographic form in order to revolutionize approach and perception. Beyond its documentary value, his work reveals the true nature of viewpoint: an invisible line linking the artist's inner landscape to his or her subject without failing to impact the viewer.

Born in Great Britain in 1945. John Hilliard has adopted a conceptual approach to modern photography that questions the norms of photographic language and practices. His work constantly probes the proces of making images: what is light ? Can the film freeze time ? Is the subject what we see ? Can our vision of reality do without fiction ?