The romance of Parisian streets in black and white photographs of a photographer in love with this city

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Shop windows, an embankment, sheets on clotheslines, hidden faces, merry-go-rounds, people who have fallen asleep on the streets - in the lens of a photographer a whole life. Isis Biedermanas used to say about Paris in his photographs: “This is not modern Paris and not old, but just mine.” The city that could fall in love with itself.

1. Street trade

2. Sensual photography

Isis Bidermanas is one of the leading representatives of humanistic photography of the last century. His works are ranked alongside such renowned French masters as Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Willie Ronny.

3. Girl with a square

Israelis Bidermanas was born in 1911 into a Jewish family in the city of Mariampol, Lithuania. His schoolmates called him a dreamer. His father wanted Isis to work as a carpenter, but the boy was passionate about painting. At the age of 13, he dropped out of school and began to study photography. Later he left his hometown to travel and take pictures.

4. Flower seller

Biedermanas decided to follow his dream and moved to Paris, the city of artists and the capital of cultural life. He arrived in France without documents, not knowing the language, but soon found a job as an assistant in a photographic studio. With the beginning of the Nazi occupation during World War II, Biedermanas temporarily left the capital and moved with his family to the south of France. There he continued to photograph and took the pseudonym Isis.

5. Vert-Galan Square

Security measures did not save the photographer, and he was captured by the Nazis. It was freed by members of the French resistance - the poppies. Biedermanas joined the underground fighters and dedicated a series of portraits to them that have figured prominently in his work.

6. Station of line 10 of the Paris Metro

Returning to Paris, the photographer began working as a portrait painter. Many famous personalities have visited his lens, including Albert Camus, André Breton, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Elsa Triolet, Marc Chagall. In 1946 his first exhibition took place in Paris. Isis soon obtained French citizenship and became a photographer for Paris Match magazine. He collaborated with this publication for about twenty years.

7. Dora Maar

The most significant works of Biedermanas were black and white street photographs taken in Paris and London. The photographer's pre-war style took on poetic features. His most beautiful shots were included in the books Paris from Dreams (1949) and The Big Spring Ball (1951). Many of the photographer's works are known to the general public from the black and white postcards of Paris, which were distributed in kiosks. But not everyone knows that their author is the poet of the French streets, Isis Biedermanas.