Belle Journée En Perspective was a group of photographers which, from 1976–82, practised a kind of collective photography. The initial members were Alain Bali, David Cosset, Philippe Dubois, Gérard Cholot, Jean-Luc Maby and Daniel Ollier, together with maverick outsiders Richard Balthaus and Gilles Cappé. In 1977, following their studio and outdoor shots of rockers, Bali, Cosset and Maby captured the emergence of the Punk movement in France and the UK, following its twists, turns and shifts until what rock critic Yves Adrien described in a 1978 article in Rock&Folk as Afterpunk: ‘Punk + distance: that is what Afterpunk is, a two-way mirror to see rock without being seen. A concept beyond all concepts, Afterpunk is not restricted to the street (which street?) or violence (which violence: March or September?). Afterpunk slips and glides over the skin (shaving afterburn): its electric purr swallows all the clichés stuck to your cheeks. Afterpunk is a lotion for the future. The sensual spectre of Afterpunk sits between the most brutal proletariat and the most liberated aristocracy. Iggy Pop’s Nightclubbing is the first Afterpunk classic. Afterpunk is a game in which the player, like a blade, gets blunt or sharp. Afterpunk is a metamorphosis.’ In 1979, an exhibition at Galerie Agathe Gaillard, Paris, acclaimed by the pope of counterculture, Jean-François Bizot, brought together, under the title I Am A Cliché, photographs by the modern youths—Asphalt Jungle, Stinky Toys, Métal Urbain, X-Ray Spex, Polystyrene, Patrick Eudeline, among others—who turned their lives into a punk scene.
