“Rather than the word portrait, concerning Jean Dieuzaide, I would prefer using the one of meeting. If he mastered and used perfectly the stripping virtues of photography to lay bare those he framed, Jean Dieuzaide did not seek to develop any psychological discourse relating to his photographs of men and women, these “encounters” during over fifty years of career. The subject never became an object; he remained, at the risk of becoming an anecdote, a human, simply isolated and highlighted by a photograph.
[…] Of course, he had a studio, superbly equipped, rational in every way. Like his lab, by the way. With guided lighting on rails, and different backgrounds. But no studio could surpass, the photographic habit of Jean Dieuzaide, the magic of a meeting, on a place in Olite. Was the light harsh, vertical? So what ! Was the subject dazzled? it did not matter ! If the visual alchemy was working at full capacity, the image would be.”
Jean Dieuzaide and Philippe Terrancle, In the intimacy of the Pyrenees, Milan, 2002, p. 115
