Neither really a humanist photographer, nor really a photo-reporter, from the 1930s to the early 1960s, Gaston Paris (1903-1964) is above all an illustrative photographer totally invested with his subjects. He documents a social and artistic life with humor and empathy where “his universe” is a circus, a funfair, a cabaret, a bistro, a street … He plays multiple scenes of joy but also of labor or waiting, loneliness and hope. His cinematographic training leads him to illuminate and pose his models, known (Brigitte Bardot, Edith Piaf, Henri Salvador or Josephine Baker) or unknown, in the same way, frontal, direct and sometimes voluntarily innocent and clumsy. Always in this spirit, he realizes series of reconstructed scenes called Nightmare, Scene of murder, Key of dreams.
Eclectic photographer passing from reportage (the exodus of Republicans during the Spanish war, airplane wind tunnel in Meudon, a railway workshop or children in the Parisian suburbs) to surrealist composition, to the very graphic composition of urban and industrial landscapes (the Eiffel Tower, the Austerlitz bridge), his square frame is always filled to perfection.
A pillar and the only salaried photographer for VU Magazine, he collaborates closely with the magazine Art et Médecine. He was also a member of Rectangle, an association of French illustrators and advertising photographers, along with Emmanuel Sougez, Pierre Jahan… His work illustrated the many illustrated magazines that were very popular at the time.
After his death in 1964, the Roger-Viollet Agency bought his production (15,000 negatives), which was as varied as it was coherent in the treatment of his reports. Today, his photographs are preserved by the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris and distributed by the Roger-Viollet Agency.
The Roger-Viollet Gallery presents for the first time, from 20/01 to 23/04, eighty modern prints ranging from 30x30cm to 60x60cm on Baryta Hahnemühle 315g paper.
Practical information
Gaston Paris, the fantastic eye
Roger-Viollet Gallery
From January 20 to April 23, 2022
6 Rue de Seine, 75006 Paris
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Information
Roger-Viollet Gallery
6 Rue de Seine, 75006 Paris
January 20, 2022 to April 23, 2022
