Christian Boltanski
Christian Boltanski was born in Paris in 1944, just days after the liberation of the city from Nazi occupation. His birth date was itself a kind of marker: he entered the world at the precise moment when France was beginning the long, painful process of reckoning with the trauma of war, collaboration, and the Holocaust. […]
Read MoreClaude Cahun
Claude Cahun was born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob in 1894 in Nantes, France, into a prominent Jewish intellectual family. Her uncle was the Symbolist writer Marcel Schwob, and her father was the publisher of a regional newspaper. The milieu in which she grew up was one of letters, ideas, and cultural ambition, and from an […]
Read MoreEugène Atget
Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget was born in 1857 in Libourne, a small town near Bordeaux in south-western France. Orphaned at an early age — both parents died before he was seven — he was raised by an uncle in the suburbs of Paris. His early life was marked by restlessness and a search for vocation that would […]
Read MoreGilles Peress
Gilles Peress was born in 1946 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, and grew up in a France still haunted by the memory of occupation and collaboration. He studied political science and philosophy at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris and the Université de Vincennes, an intellectual formation that would profoundly shape his approach to […]
Read More