De l’Une à l’autre
Le Temps

At a time when digital press dominates, Le Temps, created in spring 1998 from the merger of the Journal de Genève et Gazette de Lausanne and Le Nouveau Quotidien, returns to “its paper.” This noble material on which tens of thousands of daily issues were printed now forms its historical archives. From these, 20 pages — 20 significant front pages — have been selected from the heart of this journalistic epic.

Composing a newspaper front page means making drastic choices. Sometimes they are dictated by an event considered more important than all others. Sometimes — or simultaneously — they aim to strike readers’ senses through a headline, a photograph, a graphic design, or an illustration intended to endure in memory.

To compose a front page is thus to stage the present — and to inscribe it for posterity. It will later be read as a witness of the past, shedding light on events retrospectively. One then remembers that the world not only changes and evolves, but above all explains itself through the continuity of time, through the techniques and visual forms that succeed one another in representing history in motion. From an ordinary session of the legislative body of the Republic and Canton of Geneva in 1825 to the famine in the Gaza Strip two hundred years later.

To revisit all these front pages is, in a sense, to conjugate the present in the future perfect.

Text: Olivier Perrin, former editor at the Journal de Genève from 1986, then edition chief at Le Temps until May 31, 2023.

co-curator: Anne Wyrsch