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ÉDOUARD BOUBAT

FROM AUGUST 27 TO OCTOBER 22 2005



A retrospective that shows the very diverse talents of one of the greatest French photographers of his time

Édouard BOUBAT: Lella, Brittany, 1947

 

GALERIE DU CAP
LE QUARTZ
Brest National scene

2-4 avenue Clemenceau
BREST

INFORMATION:

Centre atlantique de la Photographie
BP 11 111 - 29 211 Brest cedex 1
Tel. 02 98 46 35 80
Site : www.centre-atlantique-photographie.asso.fr
e mail : lecap@wanadoo.fr

HOURS:

Tuesday to saturday from 1 pm to 7 pm
and every evening with a performance.

ADMISSION FEE:

Free entrance

PRESS CONTACT:

Centre atlantique de la Photographie
Tél. 02 98 46 35 80 et 06 72 68 08 49
Reproduction rights, 'illustrations
François-Nicolas L'Hardy:
e-mail :philippe.renard@sopab.fr


In collaboration with the Rapho agency in Paris, the CAP, Atlantic Center of Photography, dedicates its first exhibit of the season to an original retrospective of Edouard Boubat through some one hundred photographs representing the diversity of his work. The exhibit is also a veiled reference to the two photographers, poets and friends of Boubat the Center invited last season: Bernard Descamps and Bernard Plossu.


Images that are his alone

He spent his childhood in Montmartre, where he was born in 1923. Went to the École Estienne. Worked in a plant... On Sundays, he picked up photography. In 1947, he met Lella, his muse, the first woman to have posed for him, with whom he made some of his most famous photographs. In 1951, he exhibited at the La Hune gallery together with Brassaï, Izis and Doisneau. The magazine Réalités sent him to over thirty countries… Every time he came back with images that only he could take. Very quickly his singularity and his talent were recognized in France and abroad. He exhibited all over the world, from the Art Institute in Chicago to the Museum of Modern Art in Seoul to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. In 1976, he published his first major book La Survivance (Survival), to be followed by many others, to which writers such as Antoine Blondin or Michel Tournier will be associated.

The moments when nothing happens
In this retrospective we find the different series that represent the posterity of Edouard Boubat’s work: images of streets in Paris in the 40s and 50s, children in the streets and parks, series of flowers, images of travels -Portugal, India... – by the artist Jacques Prévert named a "correspondent of peace". Boubat was marveled by the world and by man: to photograph is to express gratitude. With lightness and elegance, he recorded the encounters, the landscapes, the instants of plenitude. He immortalized the moments when nothing happens, except for everyday life. Together with these first ensembles we see more intimate images, nudes and portraits, that complete our vision of the work of this humanist photographer, who became one of the great names in French photography.


Illustration : Édouard BOUBAT: Bigouden, Brittany, 1970


A world one only entered whispering

In 1999, he exhibited for the last time his work Lumière de la mer (Light of the sea) at the first Terres d’Images festival at Biarritz. He passed away in Paris that same year. «As he lived, he died, unchanged for all those years: a poet who lived in a dreamlike world of which he had the key. A world one only entered whispering, which he described accompanied by subtle gestures of his long hands that recalled his love for the piano», Raymond Grosset said of him.