A touching email, a beautiful story, beautiful pictures! – Jean-Jacques Naudet
I think I just understood today why I became a photographer !!!
I saw the movie on Vivian Maier the night before yesterday and it reminded me of a box I have always had that contains glass plates belonging to my grandfather from 1915/1930.
These are the negatives of the photos he took as an amateur with his large format wooden camera 13×18 adapted to the 9×12, which I had used, and that had never really looked at.
I started to scan them and I discovered superb images, well framed and interesting.
I scanned about twenty and there are already 10 beautiful pictures.
An amazing average !!!
My grandfather, Jules Beniaya, was a doctor in Algiers and, like many doctors of his time, he practiced amateur photography.
There was a reason for this interest in the photographic practice of doctors, it was that at the time it was the pharmacists who sold the chemicals and laboratory instruments, hence a proximity between the two professions.
Several medical journals published images of great photographers and amateurs.
I have in particular the years 1936, 1937, 1938 and 1939 of the monthly magazine Mieux Vivre which published each month a story with pictures of photographers like Brassaï, Doisneau, Ronis, Ergy Landau, Steiner, Kertesz, Nora Dumas, almost the same as found in Arts et Métiers graphiques Professions. Some examples of the stories include: Leaving, The Children, Dancing, Photography, Smoking, Gardens and dozens of others all illustrated with B & W photos of course.
Here are two views of the port of Algiers taken from the balcony of my grandfather’s apartment who lived in Galerie Duchassaing, for those who know Algiers. The building overlooked the Place du Gouvernement where was the statue of the Duke of Orleans.
A bathing place for ladies,
A wedding group,
3 soldiers ,
Another view of the port of Algiers,
A beautiful portrait of my grandmother Nadine Toubiana who was an opera singer (mezzo-soprano),
A family group ( a brother of my grandfather, my grandmother, my grandfather and his two daughters my mother Andrée and her sister Lélia),
The portrait of Lélia Beniaya (the sister of my mother) the day she became the first woman lawyer in Algiers in 1927,
The Nelson Park of Algiers.
