Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894–1986), as scion of
the upper class, started taking pictures in 1902 and
did so throughout his life. Experimenting more or
less consciously with forms, formats, and subjects,
he kept a visual diary of a changing world at the
same time as he explored the language of the med-
ium. Celebrated towards the end of his life, he was
one of the first French photographers to be ca-
nonized by the museums in the 1970s. His images
should be placed alongside the growing reservoir of
personnel documents on artists (see Elvire Perigo,
‘‘Intimate moments and secret gardens,’’ in Frizot)
and their vision (Loti, Zola, Bonnard, etc.), and of
family albums which have helped reassess the his-
tory of the medium since the 1980s.
Paris was undoubtedly one of the high places
of avant-garde or modernist photography in the
interwar years. A great many of the most inter-
esting modernist experimental photographers,
many of them central Europeans, met and
worked there for a few years. Not always con-
necting formally with pictorial avant-gardes yet
keeping a close contact with the ‘‘document’’
through their commercial activity, photographers
such as Hungarian Andre ́ Kerte ́sz, American
expatriate Man Ray, Jacques-Andre ́ Boiffart,
Maurice Tabard, or Emmanuel Sougez expanded
the field of photographic vision, questioning the
power of the eye to invent the world. Women
were numerous and particularly creative in both
form and content of images (Germaine Krull,
Florence Henri and the modern city, the strange
and innovative Claude Cahun).
The other avant-garde was Surrealism. Although
the work of another Hungarian immigrant, Brassaı ̈,
can be connected to that influence, it is certainly
best characterized by Man Ray, Dora Maar, Raoul
Ubac, and Hans Bellmer. Maurice Tabard (1897–
1984), who remained active for the better part of
the century from the 1930s to the 1960s, is an inter-
esting case in point, combining surrealist images
with more formal work such as photogramsa`la
Man Ray.
The interwar years also experienced the expan-
sion of ethnographic photography, in keeping with
a nineteenth-century tradition. The Mission Dakar-
Djibouti (1931–1933), collecting artifacts and ima-
ges for the Muse ́e du Trocade ́ro, was a particularly
remarkable instance which perfected Marcel Gri-
aude’s investigative method based on a system of
reconstitution (‘‘staging’’). Photography does not
seem, however, to have caught with French ethno-
graphers, in any case less than with their American
colleagues, at least until the 1960s, when a new form
of study and intervention appeared.
World War II brought an end to this most crea-
tive moment of the history of French photography.
In Vichy France, while still seen as secondary to
radio and cinema, photography was enlisted in
propaganda, and all agencies were placed under
direct control of the Ministry of Information and
Propaganda. The Central Service of Photography
(SCP), despite its modest size, became a tool for the
massive dissemination of images participating in
the cult of Marshal Petain. But the creative photo-
graphers of the prewar years either left the country
or did not collaborate with the Vichy regime and
the Nazis, and most of the propaganda remained
relatively mediocre compared to what happened in
other countries (Germany, Italy, and the Soviet
Union, and for that matter, in a different context,
the United States) (Denoyelle 11–17).
However, for humanistic photography, the
major movement of French photography, the war
was simply a parenthesis (de The ́zy). Defined
loosely as a type of approach centered on man
and proposing an ode to human life, humanistic
photography aims at revealing the hidden beauty
of the world. Between art and reportage, it was less
experimental than the extraordinary avant-garde
that preceded it, but was nonetheless its inheritor,
if only with the idea that photography was a mode
of expression in its own right. After its disappear-
ance in the 1960s, it would form the inspirational
basis for ‘‘creative photography,’’ a practice that
affirmed the inventiveness and autonomy of the
photographic medium. Marked by a great classi-
cism of composition and framing, always prefer-
ring the greatest clarity (with a medium format
Rolleiflex), finding its inspiration most of the
time in the streets of Paris and its suburbs
(although other cities and the country were not
forgotten), humanistic photography created a
type of visual imagination that was to bloom in
the culture of the immediate post war, in the
cinema, and in literature in the form of ‘‘poetic
realism.’’ Although they never formed a school
per se, the common characteristics of humanistic
photographers’ practices are strong enough to
mark them as a movement: the street, the work-
shop or factory, the working class home, and of
course thebistrotor theguinguetteand night life.
Among the best-known artists were Pierre Bou-
cher, Marcel Bovis, Brassaı ̈, Yvonne Chevallier,
Pierre Jahan, Andre ́ Kerte ́sz, Franc ̧ois Kolla,
Willy Ronis, Emmanuel Sougez and, in the next
generation, Jean-Philippe Charbonnier (1921–
2004), and Edouard Boubat (1923–1999), whose
subtle and efficient modernism makes him much
more than simply a ‘‘humanistic photographer.’’FRANCE, PHOTOGRAPHY IN