PHOTOGRAPHY, an innovation that changed the visual art scene for ever, was invented by the French, who also claim to have been its greatest masters, especially in the early stages of the genre. Many classic French photographs are found throughout the world's magazines, postcards and posters.

Many of the precious original prints, signed by the photographers, together with works by new artists in the field, are presently on show in the Shanghai Art Museum.

As the last important exhibition of the French Culture Year in China, the exhibition, "Paris in Shanghai", features works by more than 30 photographers, divided into three generations.

Unlike the other cultural events in the French Culture Year, "Paris in Shanghai" is specially curated for Shanghai Art Museum, so it is only on show here and will not be exhibited in any other city.

"We made the choice of works specially for the space of the museum," said one of the curators of the exhibition, Sophie Schmit.

She went on to explain the division of the three generations of photography.

"This is a contrived division for the convenience of explanation," said Schmit. The first generation included in the exhibit starts in 1928. Mainly shot for magazines and newspapers, these pictures were usually small and in black and white. Resonating with the theory of Henri Cartier-Bresson, these pictures tried to catch the crucial instant through the camera lens. Among the most important photographers were some foreigners living in Paris. In their works, Paris was the background, symbolizing the encounter of foreign photographers and the city. The first generation established a lasting tradition of humanism and quality news photography.

Among the exhibits are "Painter of the Tower Eiffel" by Marc Riboud, which captured a merry painter walking down the tower in light dancing steps, and many other very familiar images.

Since the 1980s, technical improvements have enabled artists to print their pictures in large sizes, and photographs started to be exhibited and collected by museums. Photographers now identify themselves as visual artists, numbering their pictures and issuing them in limited quantities.

Pictures of the time no longer aimed at recording reality, they tried to keep a distance from it instead. These colourful pictures attempted to present the invisible, and create new visual images.

Bernard Faucon, one of the pioneers in this category, came for the opening. The artist placed little doll-sized models alongside real teenagers, creating dramatic scenes. Religious events, festivals, games, and the flow of time constituted the main subjects of these nostalgic pictures.

Pierre and Gilles work as a team, one painting and the other taking pictures. Their productions, filled with advertisements, cartoons, swing and electric music, presents a world of popular performance. Georges Rousse paints cubic and geometrical images in deserted buildings to be dismantled, creating virtual cubic spaces, and capturing them in his camera lens.

As multi-media technologies were adopted, common images were viewed from unusual angles to present new effects. Catherine Ikam and Louis Fleri have worked together to present a series of "Virtual Portraits". Their new project, an interactive project that reacts to viewers sitting in front of it, is shown for the first time.

Contemporary photography makes a picture of society. Living among a vast sea of images, artists of the third generation inherit a humanist tradition from their ancestors but take it to a deeper level.

Joining the world art scene, French artists share many similar subjects with their Chinese counterparts, with the focus on human bodies, self-identification and the loss of communicative spaces.

Through April 17

Shanghai Art Museum

327 Nanjing Xilu

Tel: 6329-2829

20 yuan (5 yuan for those with student ID)