Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, known by the pseudonym Nadar, was a French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist, balloonist, and proponent of heavier-than-air flight. In 1858, he became the first person to take aerial photographs.
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French artist and humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment.
Jacques Henri Lartigue was a French photographer and painter, known for his photographs of automobile races, planes and female Parisian fashion models.
Robert Doisneau was a French photographer. From the 1930s, he photographed the streets of Paris. He was a champion of humanist photography and with Henri Cartier-Bresson a pioneer of photojournalism.
Jean-Philippe Charbonnier was a French photographer whose works typify the humanist impulse in that medium in his homeland of the period after World War II.
Larry Towell is a Canadian photographer, poet, and oral historian. Towell is known for his photographs of sites of political conflict in the Ukraine, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Standing Rock and Afghanistan, among others. In 1988, Towell became the first Canadian member of Magnum Photos.
The Maison Européenne de la Photographie, located in the historic heart of Paris, is a center for contemporary photographic art opened in February 1996.
Michel Poivert is a professor of the history of contemporary art and photography at the Sorbonne. He has taken a special interest in pictorialism, the subject of his doctorate thesis. From 1995 to 2010, he was president of Société française de photographie, the French Photography Society. In 2018, he founded the International College of Photography (CIP). In 2020, he was awarded Officier des Arts et des Lettres.
Robert Delpire was an art publisher, editor, curator, film producer and graphic designer who lived and worked in Paris. He predominantly concerned himself with documentary photography, influenced by his interest in anthropology.
Humanist Photography, also known as the School of Humanist Photography, manifests the Enlightenment philosophical system in social documentary practice based on a perception of social change. It emerged in the mid-twentieth-century and is associated most strongly with Europe, particularly France, where the upheavals of the two world wars originated, though it was a worldwide movement. It can be distinguished from photojournalism, with which it forms a sub-class of reportage, as it is concerned more broadly with everyday human experience, to witness mannerisms and customs, than with newsworthy events, though practitioners are conscious of conveying particular conditions and social trends, often, but not exclusively, concentrating on the underclasses or those disadvantaged by conflict, economic hardship or prejudice. Humanist photography "affirms the idea of a universal underlying human nature". Jean Claude Gautrand describes humanist photography as:
a lyrical trend, warm, fervent, and responsive to the sufferings of humanity [which] began to assert itself during the 1950s in Europe, particularly in France ... photographers dreamed of a world of mutual succour and compassion, encapsulated ideally in a solicitous vision.
Peter Johnston Galassi is an American writer, curator, and art historian working in the field of photography. His principal fields are photography and nineteenth-century French art.
Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare is a black and white photograph taken by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris in 1932. The picture has variable dimensions, according to the different prints, being one of them of 44,8 by 29,8 cm. It is one of his best known and more critically acclaimed photographs and became iconic of his style that attempted to capture the decisive moment in photography. The photograph was considered one of the 100 most influential pictures of all time by Time magazine.
Léon Herschtritt was a French humanist photographer. He won the Niépce Prize as a young photographer in 1960.
Les 30 × 40 or Le Club photographique de Paris was a photography club created in Paris in 1952 by Roger Doloy who was its president, with vice-president Jean-Claude Gautrand, photographer and author, and honorary president Jean-Pierre Sudre, professional photographer.
Jean-Claude Lemagny was a French library curator and historian of photography; a specialist in contemporary photography, he contributed to the world of fine-art photography in several roles.
La Recherche photographique: histoire-esthétique was a specialised peer-reviewed bi-annual French journal, published from September 1986 to spring 1997, and edited by Paris Audiovisuel and the University of Paris 8.
Les Cahiers de la photographie, published between 1981 and 1994 was a French magazine devoted to photography with the goal of promoting criticism of contemporary photography.
Boris Lipnitzki (1887–1971) was a Russian Empire-born French photographer of the arts; ballet, fashion, cinema, visual art, writing and music.
Clément Chéroux is a French photography historian and curator. He is Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He has also held senior curatorial positions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Chéroux has overseen many exhibitions and books on photographers and photography.
Patrick Zachmann is a French photojournalist, based in Paris. He is a full member of Magnum Photos. In 1989 Zachmann received the Niépce Prize, and in 2016 the Prix Nadar for his book So Long, China.
