Izis

From Marijampolė to Paris

Izis was born in 1911 in Marijampolė, in present-day Lithuania. The BnF authority record traces his study of photography in the 1920s, his move to Paris in 1930, and his early studio work.^*1 A Lithuanian Jewish cultural heritage institution records that he learned the craft in a local photographer’s workshop, moved through different places photographing towns, festivals, and people, and eventually settled in Paris.^*2 He had initially hoped to become a painter, but retouching and darkroom work undertaken to make a living turned photography into his profession. The Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History likewise describes his portrait studio in 1930s Paris and the rupture that war imposed on both life and work.^*3 His later Paris photographs therefore do not record the city of his childhood. They repeatedly select and reshape a city acquired through migration, from the position of someone who became a resident while remaining a newcomer.

Occupation and the Resistance

During the Nazi occupation, Izis, who was Jewish, left Paris and fled to the Limousin. Lithuania’s State Commission for Cultural Heritage records that after being arrested in 1944, he was rescued by the Resistance, joined the movement himself, and photographed his fellow fighters.^*4 The Musée de la Résistance in Limoges holds photographs of members of the Resistance made by Izis in 1944, preserving material evidence of this wartime work.^*5 A MoMA text from the period identified the photographing of Resistance fighters as a turning point: Izis felt that the methods he had learned in a commercial portrait studio could not simply be applied to them and needed another way of working.^*6 No statement by Izis has been located that directly attributes his later “poetic” photography to wartime experience. What is clear is that photographing the Resistance marked a move away from controlled backgrounds and lighting toward taking in people together with the environment in which he encountered them.

Paris Match and Everyday Life

From 1949, Izis worked for Paris Match for about twenty years, inside the professional system of mass-circulation news photography.^*1 Founded with Life and Vu as reference points, Paris Match used large photographic spreads to bring narrative reportage to a broad French readership in the 1950s. An Izis feature on Chagall ran to roughly twenty pages, an unusually expansive assignment for a photographer within the magazine.^*8 In a 1975 interview, however, Izis described the photograph first of all as a “document” and cautioned against imposing too much of the photographer’s personality.^*20 The fog, waiting figures, playing children, and circuses that recur in his self-directed work were unlikely to lead a breaking-news story. The two editorial environments divided his output: the magazine explained events; the photobook assembled time in which little happened. BnF research on Paris Match identifies Izis as one of the magazine’s relatively few staff photographers and documents the professional setting in which commissions and self-directed photobooks proceeded in parallel.^*8

The Institutions of Humanist Photography

“Humanist photography” was not a unified style or movement with a common postwar manifesto.^*7 The BnF situates it within a longer tradition of street photography and describes a post-Liberation professional culture of reporters-illustrateurs photographing children, work, lovers, leisure, and street life for agencies such as Rapho, magazines, advertising, tourism publishing, and photobooks.^*7 After war and occupation, such photographs signaled the resumption of daily life, but the same motifs were repeated in tourism and publishing as an image of the French way of life, often carrying nostalgia and optimism.^*23 Continuous exhibition venues for self-directed photography were scarce, so print was a major route through which photographers could gather their work under their own names.^*10 Izis worked at the center of that publishing industry as a Paris Match staff photographer, while his books selected fog, play, waiting, and circus scenes outside the hierarchy of news. His “dream Paris” therefore took shape inside the publishing systems through which postwar France reconstructed everyday life photographically, as well as through individual lyricism. The BnF exhibition La photographie humaniste 1945–1968 treated the field as an industry spanning agencies, magazines, advertising, tourism publishing, and books, with individual styles embedded in that system.^*10 Its catalogue places Izis beside Doisneau, Ronis, Boubat, and Brassaï within that shared institutional environment while distinguishing their respective publication and reportage histories.^*11 The BnF bibliography gathers the catalogues and research literature through which this postwar history of humanist photography has been studied.^*13

Doisneau, Ronis, and Brassaï

Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Brassaï, and Izis are often grouped retrospectively as “poets of Paris,” but their routes into the city were different. From the 1930s, Brassaï photographed nighttime Paris, brothels, cafés, and graffiti, establishing an earlier model in which a foreign-born photographer made the city’s darker spaces a modern subject.^*7 Ronis sustained a left-wing social concern across working-class districts, strikes, and domestic life. Doisneau, whose early work included factories and the suburbs, developed chance encounters and humor on the street across advertising and magazine assignments as well. Izis was more deeply embedded in news production as a Paris Match staff photographer, while shifting the center of gravity in his private books toward Prévert’s poetry, fog, play, and the circus. What these photographers shared was less an abstractly “human” subject than the postwar print culture through which magazine commissions and self-directed books overlapped. Within it, Izis is distinguished by the clear separation—and continual movement—between the news event of the illustrated weekly and the dreamlike sequence of the photobook.

Paris des rêves

Published in 1950, Paris des rêves became Izis’s defining photobook, organizing fragments of the city into the flow of a single volume. The BnF bibliography records it as a major publication of 1950, while the authority record notes that Izis later selected layouts for his books himself.^*1 In a 1975 interview, he said that a photograph is first a “document,” yet that a good photograph can produce something beyond documentation.^*20 In Paris des rêves, that surplus does not depend on special effects. It comes from the selection and sequencing of streets, figures, fog, play, statues, and night, and from their intersections with words. The photobook becomes a medium for creating associations among fragments of reality and constructing a temporal experience of the city distinct from the news weekly. The BnF record for Boulevard Saint-Michel shows the same photograph later repositioned in Paris des poètes, demonstrating how an image could be reused under a different publishing logic.^*14 Bibliographic records have continued to treat Paris des rêves, including later editions, as a central publication in Izis’s work.^*12

Working with Prévert

Izis repeatedly brought photographs into relation with writers’ texts, notably in collaborations with Jacques Prévert such as Grand bal du printemps. The BnF bibliography lists the book among his major publications of 1951.^*13 Through Paris Match he also photographed artists including Chagall, while circuses and street performers became recurring subjects. The Centre Pompidou’s holdings include street entertainers, urban scenes, and portraits.^*15 Research at the University of Michigan analyzes Grand bal du printemps and Charmes de Londres through the interaction of urban poetry and photography, arguing that image and text jointly construct the experience of a city; neither medium merely illustrates the other.^*21 Textimage scholarship similarly notes the close interplay of text and image in Grand bal du printemps and the further addition of Chagall’s painting in Le Cirque d’Izis.^*22 In these books, literature and photography function as parallel editing elements, creating an order of associations across the page. The CCFr record of correspondence between Jean Cocteau and Izis points to a broader network in postwar French literature and art beyond Prévert and Chagall.^*16

MoMA’s Five French Photographers

In 1951, MoMA introduced Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, and Izis in Five French Photographers.^*6 The five were not a coherent group defined by common nationality or a shared movement; they represented different generations based in Paris and working through magazines, agencies, and photobooks. Brassaï brought the prewar night city, Cartier-Bresson international reportage through Magnum, Doisneau and Ronis street and social life, and Izis the combination of Paris Match with authorial photobooks. MoMA’s presentation of them to American audiences as a single “French” photography is itself evidence of how postwar French photography circulated internationally under the signs of Paris, human figures, and everyday life. The continued presence of Izis’s Premier Mai, Paris in MoMA’s collection also shows that his international reception extended beyond the photobook.^*17

Reassessment

Izis was widely known in the 1950s through photobooks and Paris Match, though later popular recognition did not crystallize around him to the same degree as around Doisneau or Cartier-Bresson. A 2010 retrospective at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris gathered roughly 270 photographs and documents, bringing the Resistance, Paris Match, Prévert, Chagall, Israel, and the circus back into a single career history.^*18 The BnF’s 2006 exhibition La photographie humaniste 1945–1968 likewise placed him centrally alongside Boubat, Brassaï, Doisneau, and Ronis, broadening the frame from the solitary photographer of “dream Paris” to a reporter-illustrator active within postwar publishing culture.^*11 Recent retrospectives and scholarship connect exile and the Resistance, Paris Match reportage, self-directed photobooks, and collaborations with writers, locating Izis within the wider question of how postwar French publishing shaped images of everyday life. A 2007 retrospective at the Maison de la Photographie Robert Doisneau centered on the Paris Match archive of 1949–69 and examined the continuity between reportage and photobook images of the “non-event” within one career.^*9 In Lithuania, recent retrospective presentations have also addressed the gap between his reputation in France and in his birthplace, renewing attention to his biography as an émigré.^*19