Émile Savitry, published by 5 Continents Editions in 2011, is the first monographic catalogue devoted to a photographer whose work was formed within—and continually crossed—the artistic and intellectual life of Paris from the 1930s to the 1960s. A painter before turning to photography, Savitry moved among artists, writers and expatriate intellectuals, while the cafés of Montparnasse became both social setting and working environment. His career consequently resists a single category: it includes reportage, cinema stills, fashion, portraits and nudes, each connected by an alert, humanist attention to people and their surroundings.
The book follows that breadth without reducing it to biography. Savitry photographed Republican refugees from the Spanish Civil War, the ordinary life around Place Pigalle, and artists whose portraits convey an unusual degree of intimacy. He worked as a stills photographer for Marcel Carné’s films Les Portes de la Nuit and La Fleur de l’Âge, and contributed fashion photographs to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. The catalogue also recalls his role in bringing Django Reinhardt to the French jazz scene, as well as his friendships and encounters with figures including the Prévert brothers, Alberto Giacometti, Anton Prinner, Victor Brauner and Oscar Dominguez.
This range is important because Savitry’s photographs do not present modern Paris as a fixed cultural tableau. They register a network of artistic exchange, popular life and professional assignments, seen by someone who participated in that world yet remained, by temperament, observant and reserved. His portraits and nudes are especially revealing of a sensibility that could be intimate without becoming demonstrative. The return to painting later in his life gives the photographic work an additional, productive tension.
Edited by Sophie Malexis, the 112-page FRA/SPA volume gathers 92 bichrome illustrations in a softcover with flaps, measuring 21 × 23 cm. For collectors, its value lies in the concentrated account it offers of a prolific photographer whose practice spans several important strands of twentieth-century visual culture. It is both a substantial introduction and a carefully bounded record of Savitry’s distinctive position between painting, photography, film, fashion and the café society of Paris.
