Male by female - a selection of photographs by Laure Albin-Guillot

 

Étude de nu masculin, 1939.

Louis Jouvet, 1925.

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Jean Cocteau, 1939.

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Michel Lemoine, 1948.

Étude de nu, circa 1930s.

Hubert de Givenchy, 1945. (Two images.)

Nu, circa 1934.

Homme drapé, circa 1925.

Future French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing at seventeen years old, 1943. (Two images.)

 Étude de nu, circa 1930s. (Two images.)

Unknown, 1940.

*

*

*  Circa 1936-7, printed and/or signed in 1954.

 Portrait d'homme, 1942.

 Portrait d'homme, circa 1935.

Le Jeune faune - portrait de G. B., ND.

* Most if not all of these so marked were included in two books, both with texts by Paul Valéry, Narcisse and La Cantate de Narcisse. The former was published in 1936. And the latter, illustrated with twenty photographs, was published in 1941, with a print run of only thirty copies.

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Laure Albin-Guillot (15 February 1879, Paris - 22 February 1962, Paris), French photographer. Née Laure Maffredi (or Meifredy), she attended the Lycée Molière and, at the age of eighteen married Dr. Albin Guillot, a specialist in microscopy. Working from her studio at her home on Rue du Ranelagh, she published her first fashion photographs in the French edition of Vogue in 1922. The same year, she won a gold medal in a contest sponsored by Revue Francaise de Photographie. From 1924 to 1950, she exhibited regularly at the Salon international de photographie and at the Salon des artistes décorateurs. She had her first one-person exhibition with forty prints at the Salon d'Automne in 1925. And in that same year she exhibited to much acclaim at the famous Paris world fair, the Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes. Her husband died four years later and she moved to the Boulevard de Beauséjour. There she received the artistic celebrities of the day and, in the course of the 1930s, she travelled widely to North Africa, Spain, Italy, Sweden, and the United States. Her work was frequently published in the press, while she frequently participated in solo and collective exhibitions at home and abroad. In 1931 she became president of the Union féminine des carrières libérales et commerciales, an organization that worked to support the interests of women in professional life. After World War II, she continued to work in her studio, doing mostly portraiture, until she retired in 1956 to the Maison Nationale des Artistes in Nogent-sur-Marne, where she died, seven days after her eighty-third birthday. Comprising 52,000 negatives and 20,000 prints, her studio archive now belongs to the city of Paris.