Biography
Laure Albin-Guillot who was born in 1879 was
remarkable for the diversity of her production. Wife of a doctor, in the 1920s
she invented the term "micrography" to describe her works which
originated from photographs taken through a microscope. In 1922 she received
the gold medal from the French Revue of Photography competition. In 1925
she organized her first personal exhibition at the Paris Autumn Salon,
and became a well-known photographer, publishing her work in the magazines Arts
& Métiers Graphiques and Vu. During the 1930s, she developed a
quasi-pictorial style, and did more and more portraits and nudes while at the
same time working to make a lucrative living in advertising, fashion and as a
neighborhood photographer. She became a close friend of various artists,
musicians and writers and had a number of illustrations printed as special
supplements, such as Narcissus by Paul Valéry (1936), the Songs of Bilitis by
Pierre Louÿs (1937) and Debussy's Preludes (1948). As head archivist in the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts' photographic archives, she was active in working to get
photography officially recognized, and beginning in 1933, she was at the origin
of the creation of the national Cinemathèque at the Palais de Chaillot, and
envisaged a Photography Museum in the same locale. Laure Albin-Guillot died in
1963, leaving behind her a wealth of 50,000 photographs.