The publisher Robert Delpire died at the age of ninety-one on the 26th September this year. Caroline Benichou, currently Director of the Galerie VU’ in Paris, who worked with him for a decade, pays him this tribute. She chose to accompany her text with an illustration: a portrait of Robert Delpire, which he liked very much, by his friend André François.
He didn’t like, the idea that there should be a panegyric. Nothing displeased him more than eulogies.
Yet it is difficult to do otherwise, today a page has been turned.
Of him, so much remains. My intention is not to draw up (others will do it better than me) an exhaustive list of works accomplished during a life in the service of photography, publishing, authors, exhibitions, graphic arts, illustration, typography and furthermore advertising.
It is for me to pay tribute and to recall his immense contribution to the discovery, knowledge and influence of photography. To his constantly demanding and curious eye and mind, we owe the most beautiful books in photographic publishing, a plethora of major exhibitions (at the Centre national de la Photographie, which he had created with Jack Lang in 1982 but also in many other exhibition spaces around the world), fascinating texts on photography. And also a collection, Photo-Poche, the first collection of small photographic books that he wanted to produce at an affordable price, to allow as many people as possible to access works with a quality of design, iconography, text and manufacture that is both rigorous and impeccable. These black books, nowadays essential references, have enabled and will enable the discovery of photography for generations to come.
His offices in the Rue de l’Abbaye in Paris were a rare place, of work but also of conviviality. Though the layouts were spread out on an enormous table (“The form, it’s the bottom which comes to the surface”, he liked to recall, quoting Victor Hugo), the studio resounded with the activities of the graphic designers and the iconographers, the artists (photographers, writers, photographic historians…) faithful to his talent, his loyalty and his friendship, his rigour and his intellectual complicity, followed one another for work or social visits. So Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marc Riboud, Josef Koudelka, Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt, Sarah Moon, William Klein, Michael Ackerman, Christian Caujolle, Erik Orsenna… came to share studious or enthusiastic hours and passionate conversations.
Sometimes, at the end of a difficult day, as he left, he would say to me, with a sidelong smile, “After all, they’re only photographs”, then he would arrive the next day declaring (quoting the leitmotif of one of his schoolteachers), “Not difficult, not amusing”.
To pay a tribute to all those with whom he had worked, he wanted to title the exhibition devoted to him by the Rencontres d’Arles, and the Maison européenne de la Photographie in 2009, “A Thousand Thanks”. The title changed, for forgotten reasons, no doubt the ups and downs of the project. Today, it’s up to us, professionals and lovers of photography, artists and photographers, to say, “A thousand thanks, Robert Delpire”.
Caroline Benichou
