In 1968, Albert Plécy, editor-in-chief of Point de vue –Images du monde and founder of the Gens d’images association, published the second bilingual edition of his Grammaire élémentaire de l’image. The book, which was well received, attempted to develop a universal language from photographic images. In Plécy’s view, such a grammar was confined to the ‘disintegration’ of the image: the supposed objectivity of the medium, resulting in images constituting continuous and indivisible meaningful wholes, must be refuted in favour of the emergence of a grammar. Thus, according to Plécy, a photographic image is always composite; reading the image is therefore a matter of discovering its structure, particularly through the use of a ‘reading grid’ that he develops, in order to finally phrase it. However, Plécy’s research, conducted in the age of the atom and the crumbling of empires, is riddled with ideological biases that open the way to undesirable uses.