BERKELEY, CA.-The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive opened the exhibit Protest in Paris 1968: Photographs by Serge Hambourg through June 1. The year 1968 was pivotal to the political, social, and cultural histories not only of the United States but of France and many other countries across the globe. The events in Paris that year were part of a decade that saw many protests—in support of the American civil rights movement and feminism, and against American involvement in the Vietnam War, to name a few. Documentary photography published in newspapers and magazines and shown on television played an especially important role in stimulating the ferment. Searing images from the Vietnam War era, such as the Kent State student kneeling next to a fallen protestor, or the picture of a screaming Vietnamese girl fleeing napalm as she runs toward the camera, powerfully affected attitudes toward that conflict and the student protests against it.

Less familiar but similarly revealing documents of a famously turbulent moment are Serge Hambourg’s photographs of the protests against the conservative government of General Charles de Gaulle in Paris in 1968. During this year, Hambourg was working as a photojournalist for the weekly magazine Le nouvel observateur. Some of his images of the demonstrations were printed in the magazine; most of them, however, are being seen for the first time in this exhibition, organized by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. The exhibition is on view in the Theater Gallery.

The protests of May 1968 had actually begun in March, with students at Nanterre, a university in the suburbs outside Paris. Their demands for reforms at the university level grew by early May into massive demonstrations in Paris against the government itself. In mid-May, seven to ten million students and workers went out on a general strike; coupled with wildcat and sit-down strikes, this event virtually shut down the economy for two weeks. Serge Hambourg first photographed the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit talking to a group at Nanterre University in early March, and followed the demonstrations and meetings as events heated up later in the spring and summer. In these photographs one can almost feel the groundswell of popular sentiment and the strong presence of the youthful student leaders in galvanizing the demonstrators. Hambourg also captured images of the backlash by de Gaulle supporters. The photographer’s keen eye and artistic sense are evident in these images, which represent events that still reverberate almost forty years later.

Serge Hambourg is an independent photographer who worked for Le nouvel observateur from 1966 through 1977. His photographs have been reproduced in books, magazines, and journals including Paris match, New York Magazine, Time, Vogue, Le monde, Art in America, and many others. They are in the collections of museums including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the New-York Historical Society; the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; and the Hood Museum of Art. From 1977 through 1992, Hambourg lived in New York City; he now lives and works in Paris.