© 2005 Raphaël Dellaporta, France from his series on landmines. p. 65
On the assumption that a photographer takes 20 years to mature, three curators from the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne went through the images and chose 50 photographers whose work they felt would still be around in 2025.
Although the book can't represent what these artists will be doing in 2025, it can reflect what they are doing today, and this it does by giving each artist four pages of images and a small commentary by Nathalie Herschdorfer. Some photographers end up with four pages on the same theme, some with two themes of two pages each.
Not exactly a major exhibition of work for any of the artists, but the book intends to investigate the "state of the art" rather than the state of any individual artist.
What did they find? The curators state that they treated all genre equally, and only looked at the images themselves rather than bias their choice with respect to school or to genre of work. Photojournalism was accorded the same respect and consideration as edgy conceptual work. In the end, the fifty portfolios they chose were representative of all that were submitted. The works are overwhelmingly art oriented, that is they are artistic as opposed to highly technical. They are also highly theoretical, and the most common influence seemed to be Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida. The students also had a broad understanding of the history of photography, and its place in society.