Augure is a visual essay exploring news photography from the 1960s and 70s, created using press clippings from French leading current affairs magazines of the time. The series brings commercial iconography face to face with documentary imagery, offering a reflection on the dual nature of photographic practice and the growing influence of advertising on the collective imagination.

At a time when French television remained a state monopoly (a status it would retain officially until 1982), and radio and the printed press dominated the media landscape, weekly magazines represented a professional pinnacle for many photojournalists—offering large-format, full-colour publication as a mark of recognition and prestige.

Yet print media also proved fertile ground for advertisers, who saw in its expansive layouts and dramatic photo features an ideal vehicle for visual persuasion. Augure juxtaposes often violent images of conflict with equally direct depictions of consumer goods and ideals, revisiting a period that proved both ambiguous and decisive for the future of photography. During these years, the notion of photographic objectivity began to erode, giving way to the recognition of the photographer as author. Simultaneously, the growing presence of advertising photography began to shape readers not only as viewers but as future consumers.

In this fragmented media environment, major geopolitical events—decolonisation, the Vietnam War, May 1968, the Prague Spring—are found side by side with advertisements for cars, electric razors and vacuum cleaners. The faces of political leaders blend into those of film stars, and the boundaries between news and promotion become increasingly porous. History itself starts to be told through events whose status as fact, marketing content or anecdote is not always easy to determine.

By reinterpreting the visual allure of a bygone era, Augure draws on visual amalgams to suggest that, even today, history is shaped less by framing than by editing. Like a semiotic puzzle, the series invites interpretation—echoing the practice of ancient Greek and Roman augurs—as a reading of signs and symbols drawn from the entrails of the press.