Longtime reporter for the reviews «Vu» and «Détective», the photographic style of Gaston Paris will always remain naturalist and characteristic of the 1940s. His subjects of predilection are everyday life in Paris, the cabarets, the spectacles, the circus and small trades.
About the artist :
Gaston
Paris
Beginning in the 1930s, Gaston Paris was one of the pillars of the weekly magazine "Vu", founded in 1928 by Lucien Vogel. He was the only salaried photographer for the magazine, working alongside Laure Albin-Guillot, Germaine Krull, André Kertész, Martin Munkacsi, Man Ray and Robert Capa. He carried out a great many photo reports: the 1937 Exhibition, sports, music, theater, the worksite of the new Trocadéro etc. In addition to this typical production by a photographer reporter of that time, he carried out a number of small strange and personal photo reports inspired by surrealism: "Flowers without perfume, perfume of all the flowers" (1937), "The original Radium has just entered into its 26th year." (1937). As he excelled in staging strange scenes, he became one of the main contributors to Detective magazine from the end of the thirties through the fifties. His photos, vacillating between horror and melodrama, reconstituted dramatic events of gangsters and vamps. Gaston Paris's 15,000 photographs, purchased after his death in the 1960s by the Roger-Viollet agency, reveal the evolution of his vision, his familiarity with his subjects such as Simenon, Cocteau, Jouvet and Piaf and the charms of the bathing beauty contests at the Molitor swimming pool, of the backstage at the Folies Bergère, and of the studios of Yves Brayer and de Kisling.