Image education as a space for connection

On March 16, 2026, during the National Meeting of Regional Image Education Centres, organised by Normandie Images in Rouen, I took part in a round table entitled “The Time of Gazes,” alongside Mélanie Boissonneau, a lecturer-researcher at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle, and Jean-Fabrice Janaudy, distributor (Les Acacias) and operator of the Le Vincennes cinema. The discussion, moderated by Jean-Marie Vinclair (Normandie Images), focused on our relationship with time and images in a shifting digital landscape. I developed an argument there that I wish to share here in detail, as it seems to me to carry concrete stakes for the future of image education projects.

Moving beyond moral panic

The round table opened with an extract from the documentary Et si on levait les yeux? (What If We Looked Up?) by Gilles Vernet, which immediately laid out a fairly catastrophist diagnosis of screens and young people: attention deficit, language impoverishment, addiction. Mélanie Boissonneau immediately offered a salutary counterpoint, drawing in particular on the work of Anne Cordier: there is absolutely no scientific consensus on the cognitive and behavioural effects of screens, apart from physiological aspects (sleep, eyesight, hearing). The correlation between mental health and intensive screen use says nothing about the direction of causality.

This insight is very important. What predominates in mainstream discourse is a form of moral panic — a phenomenon we have seen before with pinball machines in the 1930s, comics, video games, and now screens. Mélanie recounted how a secondary school student who claimed she no longer watched films “all the way through” was in fact binge-watching five episodes of subtitled Korean k-dramas without the slightest difficulty. The problem is not attention: it is what we pay attention to.

This stigmatisation, I wanted to say forcefully, damages the bond. It fractures dialogue between generations, between professionals and audiences, between our culture and the culture of others.

Culture is an anthropological fact

This is the conceptual starting point of my intervention. Culture, in the fundamental sense, is an anthropological fact: it is what constitutes us as human beings. Every person carries a culture — their tastes, their practices, their references, their relationship with the world. Culture with a capital C, the one that cultural policies defend and promote, is merely one of many cultural forms. It is precious, but it is historically tied to logics of power.

In France, cultural policies date back to Louis XIV: they serve political power. When we say “cultural policy,” the important word is “policy.” It is an instrument we consider beneficial, but it is a political choice. And it is precisely for this reason that other political forces attack it: that is normal. It is up to us to defend the legitimacy of our stance by naming it for what it is.

Acknowledging this does not amount to relativising everything: on the contrary, it means giving ourselves the means to better understand what we do, and why. Cultural practices on social media, images everywhere — these are cultural practices, and they are in fact the predominant cultural practices, since average screen time is four and a half hours a day. We, culture professionals, are the marginals of culture! We are not at the centre: we are at the margins. But as Godard said, it is the margins that hold the page together.

Cultural rights as a compass

There is a legal and philosophical framework for thinking about all of this: cultural rights, enshrined in French law since 2015 and 2016 (the NOTRe Act and the LCAP Act). They invite us to respect the culture of others in the anthropological sense — that is, not to start from the premise that our culture is intrinsically superior to that of the people we work with.

When I lead collective filmographies in classrooms — an exercise where I simply ask each student what their favourite film is — something remarkable happens. At first, people hesitate. Then the noise level rises in the classroom, because we are talking about pleasure. The teacher worries about losing control, but I reassure them: when you throw a party at home, there is noise. It is a sign of pleasure.

And I discover things. Unexpected filmographies, audiovisual cultures I knew nothing about. Sometimes, cinephilias that young people do not even dare share with their friends, but which they confide in a context of trust. That is the starting point: taking an interest in the culture of others. When you ask people about what moves them, you discover far more than you imagined. And dialogue can begin.

This is not demagoguery. It is simply learning from others. As Jean-Fabrice Janaudy demonstrated with concrete eloquence during this round table: when he shares his passion for repertory cinema with students from housing estates — with Kurosawa, with John Ford, with Hitchcock — and those students cry at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance asking “why do they never show us films like this?”, it is precisely because there was a bond of trust, time spent in preparation, a dialogue. What he brings is his culture — not a norm, but a sharing. And he shares it with contagious generosity.

Cultural rights also lead us to a fundamental distinction: between cultural democratisation and cultural democracy. Democratisation is vertical: decisions are made from above about what is good and disseminated downwards. Cultural democracy is horizontal: we build together, starting from what each person brings. These are entirely different dynamics of cooperation.

The colonial legacy of cultural democratisation

I wanted to recall during this round table a historical fact that people often prefer to forget. In 1959, when the Ministry of Culture was created, nobody wanted it: money had been taken from national education and popular education. It was impossible to set up the decentralised state services, so officials were brought in from Africa — people who had worked in the colonies — to approach French territory as a space of cultural conquest. Émile Biasini recounted that when he went to convince regional presidents, it felt to him like being in Africa in the bush: selling trinkets and Culture with a capital C.

I am not saying this is wrong. But cultural democratisation carries this legacy within it: a colonialism on the territory, a system of domination through culture as hierarchical domination. It is not our fault, but it is our history. And it is good to be aware of it, so as not to reproduce — even unintentionally — postures of domination when we claim to “bring culture” to audiences.

We are changed by screens, and it is not a catastrophe

In anthropological terms, screens — primarily those of our phones — are changing our relationship with space, time, and reality itself. Our lives are mediated by these tools. This is a fact. But the stigmatisation of young people in the face of these shifts is a historical constant. A complaint attributed to Socrates in the fourth century BC reads: “our youth love luxury, have bad manners, and show contempt for authority.” The domination of adults over young people is as old as time.

There are also new functions of images that need to be understood rather than judged. Lives on Twitch or TikTok serve specific functions. Photos sent without being saved have a form of orality. Selfies, initially interpreted as narcissism, fulfil complex identity and relational functions. As the semiologist Roger Odin emphasised as early as the 1970s regarding amateur images, there is no value judgement to be made: there are functions to be understood (amateur images are indispensable for constructing our identities; professional images serve to entertain, inform, propagandise, sell…).

Let us also not forget that cinema, at its invention in 1891 with the kinetoscope, consisted of striptease shows and boxing matches watched through peepholes. The small screen preceded the large one (in 1895, with the invention of the cinematograph). Cinema was long considered pornography before being recognised as an art. Practices judged very negatively today might well, tomorrow, be considered differently. Letting go of one’s criteria of judgement also means giving oneself the possibility of seeing what is emerging.

The quality of time rather than its quantity

A central issue in the discussion concerned time. We lack time, teachers are overburdened, budgets are shrinking. Mélanie Boissonneau rightly pointed out that teachers have less and less time to prepare for film screenings, and that administrative constraints are growing heavier. Jean-Fabrice Janaudy, for his part, demonstrated that when you invest preparation time — two hours in the classroom beforehand, two entire mornings of screening — secondary school students watch Shoah by Claude Lanzmann in absolute silence.

My position, which I developed during the round table, is to work on the quality of time rather than lamenting its scarcity. Time is a relative notion, both physically and psychologically. When there is less time and less budget, the question becomes: how can we increase the quality of that time?

This is exactly what we experimented with at the Nouvelle-Aquitaine regional image centre, as part of a survey of image education conducted with Aurore Schneekönig in Nouvelle-Aquitaine. We had many stakeholders to bring together, little budget, little time. But we spent a long time preparing how to organise our time together. Everyone prepared. The moments of encounter were consequently remarkably intense and effective. There was quality of time because there had been groundwork.

What we produce with audiences always reflects what we produce among ourselves, among professionals. If our collective working time is rushed, our actions will be too. If we take care of the way we work together, that care is transmitted.

Concrete proposals for image education

Over the course of this round table, I put forward several methodological proposals, which seem to me to constitute as many avenues for renewing image education practices:

• Take official, institutional time to ask young people what they watch, what they do with screens. Not informally, not in passing: a dedicated, recognised time where we take a genuine interest in their practices. We will discover things. Hidden cinephilias, unsuspected audiovisual cultures, competencies of seeing that we do not suspect. This is the path opened by Michel Serres in Petite Poucette in 2012: observing cognitive changes, seeing different worldviews, neither better nor worse.
• Evaluate our own practices, question ourselves. Not starting from the assumption that what we do is necessarily good. Sometimes we get it wrong. And there is no problem with that, provided we talk about it. Cultural rights offer very fine evaluation tools, without judgement, that allow us to revisit our professional postures. We must try to let go of our criteria: new things do not yet have criteria, so we cannot judge them by the old ones.
• Respect the culture of others. Beware of war rhetoric. When discourse about screens borrows the vocabulary of combat (“fight against,” “resist,” “protect”), we enter a logic of the state of exception that ends up eroding democracy. We experienced this during Covid.
• Work on our working methods among professionals. This is what we did with the Nouvelle-Aquitaine regional image centre: discussion groups, creativity among people, qualitative approaches. When we make space for the voice of others, collective intelligence emerges, and it is magnificent and constructive.
• Take our responsibilities as adults. The main problem with screens for children is the way parents use them. It is adults who are on their screens all the time, because they have not been trained. They often understand screens less well than their own children. This is not about blame: it is an observation. Instead of putting everything on young people’s shoulders, let us start by working on ourselves. If we question ourselves, others can too. If we hold on to our position of power, others will oppose us.

Training teachers, a silent emergency

One point struck me as particularly glaring during this day: the question of teacher training. For five years, with the Institut pour la Photographie in Lille, we have been running year-long training programmes for teachers, in partnership with the INSPE. But the INSPE refused to allocate teaching hours to them. The result: teachers come to train during their school holidays. Two days during each of their breaks. Those who come are wonderful, highly motivated. But it reveals a systemic problem.

Twenty-five years ago, I was running a great many training sessions for teachers. I do fewer and fewer, because there are fewer and fewer. And having led many of these sessions, including in atypical formats, I can testify: teachers lack confidence in themselves to accompany a screening. If they have not been trained, they do not know how to go about it, and often prefer to do nothing. Students then find themselves “dropped” in front of a film without having been prepared.

It is a paradox that Jean-Marie Vinclair summed up well: there has never been a greater need to accompany how people see, and at the same time a growing scarcity of time and resources to do so. This makes the quality of the tools we can produce upstream all the more crucial: booklets, videos, resources, methods.

Experience as a foundation

I wanted to conclude my intervention by returning to the essential: what people experience. When students enter a cinema and see a film that moves them deeply, we do not know exactly what they have learned. What we know is that they have lived through a powerful experience, a founding one for them. And that is something we prepared carefully.

Last year, I worked in a day hospital for autistic children. With these children, instructions do not exist. I would spend time thinking with the psychologists, then prepare an entire installation in the room: which image-making and sound-making objects would allow the young people to take ownership through their own process. As an educator, you are a facilitator: people learn by themselves. It is not us who teach them things. It is the experience they live through that does the work.

Preparing for what will be a moment of quality: that is more or less my relationship with time in image education. And it is, I believe, what makes these projects not only useful but profoundly necessary. Not to “train viewers” in the sense of formatting, but to open spaces where gazes can unfold, meet, enrich one another, and be mutually transformed.