Greyscale Masters: Gare du Nord -- Dutch Photographers in Paris 1900-1968 (Hague Exhibition)

Emmy Andriesse:   JulietteGréco and Erskine Caldwell (1948)



THE HAGUE.-
 

     “Paris was where it was at. It was the place to be. For decades thesparkling nightlife and intellectual ferment of the French capital attractedwriters and artists from around the world. Among them were Dutch photographers,who flocked to Paris to capture romantic images of life in the city’s streets. Inthis exhibition, pictures snapped by photographers like Henri Berssenbrugge,Emmy Andriesse, Ed van der Elsken and Johan van der Keuken bring to life thetwentieth-century metropolis that plays the starring role in the Gemeentemuseum DenHaag’s concurrent exhibition Paris, City of Modern Art.

         Paris shares a longhistory with photography; it is the birthplace of the medium. It would become the city of modern art, but it was the capital of photography right from the momentwhen LouisDaguerre first presented his discovery to the world in 1839. Dutch photographerswere already going there in the 1920s and ’30s to study thediscipline at specialist schools or in the hope of learning the profession by working as assistantsto renowned practitioners like Man Ray or Berenice Abbott.

Maria Austria:  Paris (1960)



     In the 1950s, Paris quicklyrecovered its pre-war attractiveness; the city had lost nothing of itsglamour in the intervening years and it held a strong appeal for the generationof twenty-year-olds who were now discovering the world. The photo-books aboutParis published between 1954 and 1963 by Nico Jesse, Ed van der Elsken andJohan van der Keuken were immediately hugely popular. They show a dream world far from the pettyand restrictive Dutch society of the period; the most photographed city in the world held out the prospectof a more intense and adventurous life. These books did much to create the alluring image of Paris that stillexists in the collective consciousness of the Dutch population.

     Nico Jesse’s1954photo-book Vrouwen van Parijs (‘Women of Paris’) gives a light-hearted and romantic view of the city.Jesse – a family doctor as well as a passionate photographer – photographed no fewer than 2000 women in the space of tendays. His portraits of actresses, students, mannequins and female vagrants offered a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes of Parisand introduced the Dutch public to the ‘Parisienne’ in all her different facets.

 AtaKando:  Gare du Nord (1957)



       In his 1956 photo novel Een liefdesgeschiedenis inSaint Germain de Prés (also published as Loveon the Left Bank), Ed van derElsken offered a rather different view of the city. He had been living in Paris for a number of years andtherefore had more opportunity to photograph realstreet life. He hung around with agroup of existentialist young people whom he photographed regularly. They became the maincharacters in his (fictive) love story, which portrayed a rougher and tougherside of Parisian life (in particular that of the bohemian artists in and aroundthe Quartier Latin).

     Gare du Nord showcases work by around fifty Dutch photographers. Exhibits willinclude images not only of anonymous street life, but also of celebrities like Orson Welles, Juliette Gréco, Christian Dior and the still extremely young Brigitte Bardot and Yves Saint Laurent. In addition, there will be a chance to see two short experimental films: Joris Ivens’ 1927 filmÉtudes des mouvements à Paris (Studies of Movements in Paris) and De Hallen van Parijs (also known as Les Halles de Paris) made byPaul Schuitema in 1939. The latter was digitized last year by Eye Film InstituteNetherlands and is now for the first time available to the general public.” 

Emmy Andriesse:  Rooftops of Montmartre (1948)


NOTE: 


This description of thecurrent Gare duNord photography exhibition atthe Museumof Photography in The Hague (which can be viewed until January 17^th), which I sawonline, and its accompanying image of Juliette Gréco (after some research, I’veselected several more photos in the show for inclusion here), hit me hard for some reason.

Maybe it’s justpost-holiday doldrums, but the idea of the hope of Paris and all its visualbeauty resonatedall evening until this morning, something that rarely happens these days.  


I know almost nothing about 20^thcentury Dutch photography or that aspiring young Dutch photographers flocked to Paris fortraining (with Man Ray and Berenice Abbott, no less), but what I saw hereimpressed and moved me a lot.  Fascinating alsothat all ofthe photographers I’ve chosen here save one (that great Fred Brommet shot below) arewomen.


Although I’ve spent somesignificant time in Paris, I’ve only visited the Gare du Nord once, as far as I canrecall.  Several years ago, during ourMona Lisa/Leaning Tower of Pisa trip to France and Italy with Jane, we boardedthe overnighttrain from Paris to Pisa there.  On the platformwalking toward our coach, the daughter of an old friend unexpectedly hailedme.  We shared dinner with her that night and thewhole evening and next day became a great adventure that reminded me of aGraham Greene novel from the 1930s. 

A couple of years later,my then 12-year old surprised me by saying (when we were trying to plan astill-untaken family vacation abroad): “Dad, you know how I feel about Paris.”

I love masters of the “greyscale.”  They really, really seem to Know.

Fred Brommet, LigneTrompette, Jacques Heim 1954