Tendance Floue is a French collective whose globe-trotting ways are deliberately hard to pin down. (Their name means fuzzy or blurred tendency.) Currently comprised of 12 members, they fixate on achieving a sort of fraught objectivity in their work by developing a mishmash of an image archive. A 2006 project on display at Alliance française is entitled Sommes-Nous? (Are We?), and is described by the group as a series of photos showing “un monde complexe et inquiété dont l’homme est le principal acteur” (“a complex and troubled world in which man is the principal actor”).
If this sounds post-human, that’s because it is (the text for Sommes-Nous? was written by the group’s late mentor, Jean Baudrillard) — and this detachment has a quality both of valiance and of fecklessness to it. The former derives from the tradition laid down by similar collectives, namely Magnum, which chronicled all the key events of the last half of the 20th-century with declared intrepidity and impartiality. Tendance Floue seem to call Magnum on their light hypocrisies, significantly toning down the aesthetic identity of their own photos. One shot of a woman in Marrakesh watching television cannot really be read (without straining, at least) as anything other than a slice of life.

Tendance Floue claim in their mission statement that their writing, the exposition on their projects, occurs chiefly within and between their images. There is an assumption here that viewers might be edified, perhaps even shocked into greater self-awareness, by consuming images with no context. This is not convincing, or attractive. Isn’t our craving for narrative related to our desire to understand and to empathize? For Tendance Floue, such fundamental, and indeed human, ways of seeing seem too great a danger.