Lucien Clergue: The War Orphan Who Charmed Picasso and Made Photography Fine Art
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In 1957, barely into his twenties, Lucien Clergue published his first photography book, and it came with a cover designed by Pablo Picasso, an introduction written by Jean Cocteau and poems selected from the surrealist Paul Éluard. Most photographers spend a lifetime chasing that kind of company. Clergue got it before he'd had a single major exhibition, and it wasn't luck. It was the payoff of a childhood spent surviving war, poverty and grief, and turning all of it into a camera lens.
A Childhood Built From Ruins
Clergue was born in Arles in 1934, in a town famous for its Roman amphitheater and, by the time he was a kid, equally well known for the rubble left behind by World War II air raids. His house was destroyed in a bombing raid near the end of the war, and not long after, his mother died, leaving him without a parent as a teenager. She'd already set his life in motion though. When he was thirteen, she gave him his first camera, a cheap black Bakelite box, after years of paying for violin lessons she'd hoped would turn him into a musician. He left school not long after to work in a factory and pay off debts she'd left behind. Photography wasn't a hobby he picked up in comfort. It was something he built out of loss.
The Bullfight That Changed Everything
In April 1953, at a bullfighting event in Arles, the nineteen year old ran into Pablo Picasso and worked up the nerve to show him his photographs. It could have ended there, but two years later Clergue turned up at Picasso's home in Cannes, La Californie, and the two men struck up a friendship that lasted two decades, right up until Picasso's death in 1973. Over that time Clergue photographed him constantly and casually, in his studio, cuddling his dog, smoking, sunbathing, watching bullfights. He eventually assembled twenty seven of these encounters into what amounted to a visual diary of Picasso's later life. Picasso, for his part, became godfather to Clergue's daughter Olivia.
Cocteau, Éluard and a Debut Most Photographers Only Dream Of
Picasso wasn't the only giant in Clergue's corner early on. In 1956 he met Jean Cocteau in Paris, and the connection paid off fast. The following year, Clergue's first book, Corps mémorable, hit shelves with a cover by Picasso, an introduction by Cocteau and poems by Paul Éluard. For a photographer with no formal training and barely any exhibition history, it was an almost absurd amount of firepower behind one slim volume. Cocteau later brought Clergue onto the set of his final film, Testament of Orpheus, in 1959, giving him total access to document the six week shoot. Clergue described the experience like stepping into another world, writing that man-horses, man-dogs, the Sphinx, the goddess Minerva, and mythological figures such as Oedipus, Orpheus and Tiresias were all living with them on set.
The Nudes That Turned Bodies Into Landscape
By the mid 1950s Clergue had also started the series that would define him, black and white nudes photographed on the beaches of the Camargue, the marshy delta region near Arles. He shot women half buried in sand or caught between waves, deliberately leaving faces out of frame so the bodies read more like landscape than portrait. It was a bold thing to be publishing before the sexual revolution of the 1960s had even started, and it worked. Arthur Kales had already shown decades earlier that a camera could be handled like a paintbrush, and Francis James Mortimer had proven that darkroom manipulation belonged in fine art conversations too, but Clergue pushed further, treating skin itself as terrain. E.J. Bellocq had approached nude photography with a similar sense of dignity back in early 1900s New Orleans, working in a genre that could easily tip into exploitation and choosing not to. Clergue's version of that same instinct, paired with the geology of his home region, became the work that MoMA in New York picked up in 1960, making him the first French photographer exhibited there.
Making Photography a Fine Art
Clergue spent the back half of his career trying to get photography treated with the same seriousness as painting or sculpture, and he had the résumé to back the argument. In 1970 he co-founded the Rencontres d'Arles with the novelist Michel Tournier and curator Jean-Maurice Rouquette, a festival that's still one of the biggest photography events in the world and that pulled in figures like Ansel Adams within its first few years. In 1979, he defended a doctoral thesis at the University of Provence built entirely out of photographs rather than written text, with a preface from the critic Roland Barthes. Three years later he helped found the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, giving the medium its own dedicated academic home. Postwar photographers had been figuring out how to make sense of a broken world in real time too. Todd Webb was doing something similar across the Atlantic, walking the ruined and rebuilding streets of New York with a camera not long after Clergue was doing the same, in his own way, in the south of France.
The First Photographer in a 400 Year Old Academy
The clearest proof that Clergue had won his argument came in 2006, when he became the first photographer ever elected to France's Académie des Beaux-Arts, prompting the institution to create an eighth section specifically for photography. He'd already been made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 2003, and he went on to serve as the Académie's president in 2013, an extraordinary position for someone who'd started out as a factory worker with a Bakelite camera and no formal art education.
Final Years and Legacy
Clergue married art curator Yolande Clergue, who founded the Foundation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, and the couple raised two daughters, gallerist Anne and handbag designer Olivia, Picasso's godchild. By the time he died on November 15, 2014, in Nîmes at eighty, Clergue had produced somewhere around 800,000 photographs and published more than 75 books. The following year's Rencontres d'Arles was dedicated to his memory, and the Grand Palais in Paris mounted a retrospective of his earliest work called Lucien Clergue: The First Albums.
It's a strange arc for a kid who grew up picking through bomb rubble in a town full of Roman ruins, but that's more or less the throughline of Clergue's whole career. He kept finding beauty and structure in things that looked broken, whether that was a bombed out building, a body on a beach or a medium nobody else took seriously yet, and he built an entire life's work out of insisting it was there all along.
