Laure Albin Guillot “a name with a certain ring to it that is destined to become famous” to quote a publication from just after the Second World War. The photographic style and aura of Laure Albin Guillot (Paris 1879 – Nogent-sur-Marne 1962) most definitely left its mark on French photography in the post-war years: she was certainly the most in view and highly renowned, not just for her talent and virtuosity but also her commitment to the profession. Laure Albin Guillot’s photos were undeniably in vogue in the 1930s and 1940s, but the woman behind the photos, of reserved temperament, is still an enigma today. Paradoxically very few studies* have been devoted to the work and career of this emblematic figure who is “the most well-known and the only one to have managed to stand the test of time”.

Not a lot is known of her beginnings in the ‘world of photography’ before the First World War, although proof exists of her personal photographic work and experiments. Laure Albin Guillot’s first resounding works appeared in exhibitions and publications in the 1920s: this period in Paris saw the emergence of some of the major names in the history of 20th century photography and the creation of a modern aesthetic that would be mediatised by the press and rapidly adopted by industry and commerce alike.

In a landscape where modernity and the production of the avant-garde found favour in both the eyes of the public and contemporary taste, Laure Albin Guillot’s photography could seem to belong to a contrary and almost outdated tradition. And yet it was her photos, embodying a certain idea of ‘French good taste’ that were widely praised at this time. And it was mainly during the Thirties and the Forties that Laure Albin Guillot, as a professional artist and public figure, held centre stage in the photographic scene. An independent photographer, she devoted her skills to a wide variety of genres such as portraiture, nudes, landscapes, still lifes and, to a lesser extent, reportage; of unequalled technical prowess, she took photography to an almost elitist level. A resolutely modern photographer, she made use of all the new means of image distribution and supplied the press and publishing industries with illustrations and advertising images.
If she was also one of the first in France to envisage the decorative applications of photography, in particular by posing the question of a work’s format, it was notably through her formal research into the infinitely small – photomicrography that she renamed ‘micrography’ – that Laure Albin Guillot opened out new creative perspectives that were a combination of science and the visual arts. Finally this “great lady of French photography”, a member of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs, the honorary director of the Fine Arts Ministry’s photographic archives and the first curator of the Cinémathèque nationale, was clearly one of the most active figures of her period and one of the most aware of those key questions facing photography and more generally culture at that time.

This monographic exhibition devoted to Laure Albin Guillot will bring together a substantial number of pieces composed of 130 original prints and contemporary documents from museums and European collectors and also from the Roger-Viollet collections (conserved by the Parisienne de Photographie) which acquired the Albin Guillot collection in 1964. It will be partly based on an in-depth study of this collection (negatives and original prints) that have been conserved until today.

This project will be accompanied by a publication that will retrace the artist’s life and career and which will analyse her work and her photographic practice in terms of its relationship to arts and crafts and literature. Laure Albin Guillot’s oeuvre will therefore also be a means to explore an aesthetic that dominated the period between the wars and to question by the same occasion our contemporary opinions of this period.


* the first and only monographic work "Laure Albin-Guillot ou la volonté d’art" was published by Christian Bouqueret in 1996.