Marcel Bovis (1904-1997)

The Consummate collector and editor-in-chief for 50 years of French weekly Paris Match, Roger Thérond, in an interview conducted not long before his death by American Photo editor David Schonauer, said this about the power of photography: It holds forever our collective memory –at any rate, our collective memory of the 20^th century.

French photographer Marcel Bovis, who on September 15, 1997, passed away at the age of 93, photographed with endless curiosity and enthusiasm a small world within that most turbulent and fecund 20^th century. His images of French and North African cities, and his street scenes of nocturnal Paris, are truly part of that collective memory.

Born in Nice in 1904, and schooled at its Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs, Bovis arrived in Paris at the age of 18 to take up employment as a decorator at Les Galeries Lafayette.

In 1927, just back from military service, Bovis ventured on a nocturnal walk with camera in hand and made his first significant photographs: Bar des As, L’Hotel du Nord, and Taxi rue Lebrun, simple images of Paris that focused on the similar subjects that had so intrigued Eugène Atget.

I search in the night with instinct, not with reason, Bovis explained. He explored theatres, operas, music halls, cabarets, and other spots frequented by nocturnal Parisians. Other photographers of the era also captured the night, notably Brassaï, Doisneau, and Izis among them. But Bovis had his own vision –naïve art, as seen at carnivals and in the crudely painted signs of street merchants, fascinated him. Joining image with words, his simple photographs created their own surrealistic literature. Indeed he frequently quoted his collaborator, Pierre Mac Orlan, insisting that L’art photographique est un art littéraire. Indeed, Bovis illustrated novels.

Bovis was also fascinated by the circus, capturing images from many of the most famous, such as Medrano, Bobino and Cirque d’Hiver. And he photographed the young Duke Ellington in 1933, and later Charlie Parker.

The decades between the two great wars was a time of political ferment -likeminded photographers banded together. Bovis joined Le Rectangle in 1941, and later Le Groupe des XV. Though sharing ideas and goals, the members –including Robert Doisneau, Lucien Lorelle, Daniel Masclet and the Seebergers– had different personalities. Writer Alain Fleig reports on their mutual incomprehension as secret jealousies.

In 1951, Bovis joined another group. Dr. Otto Steinert’s Subjective Photographie movement, centered in Saarbrücken, Germany. The next year, Bovis was included in the World Exhibition of Photography in Lucerne, Switzerland –one of the first such international exhibition following World War Two. But even earlier, in 1947, Bovis organized an exhibition introducing a new presence on the scene: American photography.

Very early in his career, Bovis became associated with Arts et Métiers Graphiques, and through the decades he collaborated with writers of the ministry of tourism and other government agencies on documenting such varied subjects as the cathedrals of Chartres and Bourges, Algeria, the city of Marseille, and Paris at night.

In 1991, Bovis donated his great body of work -23,000 negatives with contact prints- to the French government, to be administrated by the Patrimoine Photographique, the repository of the works of 14 of France’s most well-known photographers.

At the Palais de Tokyo in Paris the following year, in an event crowning his career, Bovis was honoured with a retrospective of those hauntingly beautiful images that so masterfully captured vignettes of the 20^th century – images that have become, to quote Roger Thérond part of our collective memory.