Continuing its annual exploration of rural life, the initiative La profondeur des champs (Depth of fields), set up by the Conservation Départementale des Musées du Gers and the Centre Patrimonial de Flaran celebrating its thirtieth anniversary here traces its sixteenth furrow.
The Abbaye de Flaran had already celebrated, in 2021, the monumental works of Jean Dieuzaide (1921–2003) on the centenary of his birth. This time, a previously unseen series is presented, highlighting the journey of Yan and his wife Jacqueline in Turkey. As the couple’s trip was to last three months, their son Michel was entrusted to his aunt, Hélène, while a family nanny looked after their daughter. Although deeply rooted in his native Southwest particularly the Gers Jean Dieuzaide, the Gascon, also responded to a few assignments abroad. For Éditions Arthaud, he explored Spain, Portugal, Sardinia and also Turkey in 1955, meeting its inhabitants and their Mediterranean culture. His son Michel tells us*: “It was on the occasion of these different journeys that my father’s humanist streak asserted itself, in which he was quickly pigeonholed, often ignoring the variety of themes he tackled and the other facets of his photographic creation at which he was just as accomplished.”
True to his compositions of shadow and light, he succeeded in conveying the essence of the country and the spirit of an era, capturing the everyday lives of artisans and fishermen, culminating in the emblematic backlit image of a team of horses titled “La chevauchée,” which enabled him to become the first winner of the Prix Niépce, created that same year, 1955 the photographic equivalent of the Goncourt.
“Is not the photographer precisely the prototype of the new artist we see emerging today the one acting in the world among realities, and no longer the one who withdraws from the world in order to better reveal its reality. We would not claim that Jean Dieuzaide solved the problem. No one is close to doing so. But we see that he is the only one among the great French photographers to have fully embraced it.” Jean-Claude Lemagny, Chief Curator, Photography Department, Bibliothèque Nationale (1968–1996).
Carrying an undeniable quality, an acute sense of framing and a palpable emotion, these sixty-two black-and-white photographs once again illustrate the originality of this devotee of humanity, whose leading role deserves to be reaffirmed within the landscape of French photography.
Jean-Jacques Ader
Exposition photographique « La Turquie de Jean Dieuzaide » à l’Abbaye de Flaran (Gers) logis abbatial – dans le cadre de La profondeur des champs, sillon N°16 –
From 11 October 2025 to 22 March 2026.
* A catalogue bringing together all the photographs is published each year.
Information: https://www.patrimoine-musees-gers.fr/le-reseau/abbaye-de-flaran/
