Black and White Photography Jeanloup Sieff

Jeanloup Sieff (November 30, 1933 – September 20, 2000)
"Born in Paris, the son of a Polish engineer, Jeanloup Sieff received a camera for his 14th birthday and since never departed from his previous gift. After having failed in entering the film industry, he established himself as a fashion photographer for Elle from the mid 1950s. He introduced an innovative feel of eroticism to photographs that had until then privileged respectable and stiff models and set his shoots in real locations while he pushed his sitters to seductively flirt with the camera. Often emphasizing a specific area of the body - mostly backs and bottoms - Jeanloup Sieff believed that ‘sometimes, the face is not interesting when the body is. Sometimes the face is a distraction.’ With his wide-angle black and white images, the French photographer caught the dramatic potential of light and shadow while he often added a touch of humour to his pictures, playing with situations and his sitters like Alfred Hitchcock urged to run after a model he is about to strangle, on the set of Psycho. Obsessed by women, Jeanloup Sieff nonetheless captured one of fashion photography’s most legendary male nude when Yves Saint Laurent posed, in 1971, for his perfume Y and mastered the art of street photography. ‘Girlfriends and landscapes were the subjects of my early photographs. I've never lost interest in those subjects. I continue my childhood.’"(theredlist.com)

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Experimental photography Maurice Tabard

Maurice Tabard (July 12, 1897 – February 23, 1984)was a French photographer. Tabard was one of the leading photographers of the Surrealist movement, which he entered under the influence of his friend, American phtographer Man Ray
Tabard was born in Lyon, France in 1897 to a silk industrialist and an amateur musician. His first artistic experiences were as a pattern designer for silk textiles. In 1914, he and his father left Paris for New York, where he pursued photography at the New York Institute of Photography. He continued his studies through to 1920 with fellow photographer, Emile Brune.Wikipedia

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Surreal Photography Lucien Clergue

"Lucien Clergue was born in 1934 in Arles, Southern France. The only son of shop owners, Clergue’s early life was interupted by the experience of poverty and destruction brought on by the war years. In 1952, at the age of 18, he was faced with the untimely death of his mother. Clergue channeled his energies into shooting photographs with a box camera his mother had gifted him a few years before her passing.
Clergue taught himself photography in his free time while working in Southern France. He quickly built a reputation for himself, and over the years formed lasting and influential relationships with many renowned artists, collectors, and benefactors, including Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, St. John Perse, Roland Barthes, Michel Tournier, James Jones, Ansel Adams, Andre Kertesz, Irwing Shaw, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Eikoh Hosoe, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau.

 The myriad of subject matter featured in Clergue’s work includes a series depicting the war ruins of Arles, Spanish bullfighters, the French countryside, and of course, the female nude. The brilliance and integrity of his vision has led many private collectors and institutions to seek out and exhibit his work. In 1961, Edward Steichen invited him to undertake a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art. The next year he exhibited again, this time at the pavillon de Marsan, Palais du Louvre, Paris.

Clergue has since been decorated with the honor of the National Order of Merit by President Giscard d'Estaing in 1979, and in 2003 received the highest honor bestowed by the the French Ministry of Culture as a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur. In 2006 he became the first photographer to be a member of the Academy of Fine Arts of the Institute of France. In 1969 he founded and organized The Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie of Arles, which celebrated its 35th anniversary in 2004 with an exhibition homage for Clergue’s 70th birthday."(louissternfinearts.com)

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Lucien Clergue

Lucien Clergue (August 14, 1934 – November 15, 2014) was a French photographer. He was Chairman of the Academy of Fine Arts, Paris for 2013.Lucien Clergue was born in Arles, France. At the age of 7 he began learning to play the violin, and after several years of study his teacher admitted that he had nothing more to teach him. Clergue was from a family of shopkeepers and could not afford to pursue further studies in a college or university school of music, such as a conservatory. In 1949, he learned the basics of photography. Four years later, at a corrida in Arles, he showed his photographs to Spanish painter Pablo Picasso who, though subdued, asked to see more of his work. Within a year and a half, young Clergue worked on his photography with the goal of sending more images to Picasso. During this period, he worked on a series of photographs of traveling entertainers, acrobats and harlequins, the « Saltimbanques ». He also worked on a series whose subject was carrion.

In 1968, and with his friend Michel Tournier, Clergue founded the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival which is held annually in July in Arles. He exhibited his work at the festival during the years 1971–1973, 1975, 1979, 1982–1986, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1994, 2000, 2003 and 2007.
Clergue also illustrated books, among them a book by writer Yves Navarre.
Clergue took many photographs of the gypsies of southern France, and was instrumental in propelling the guitarist Manitas de Plata to fame.

Clergue’s photographs are in the collections of numerous well-known museums and private collectors. His photographs have been exhibited in over 100 solo exhibitions worldwide, with noted exhibitions such as in 1961, at the Museum of Modern Art New York, the last exhibition organized by Edward Steichen with Lucien Clergue, Bill Brandt and Yasuhiro Ishimoto. Museums with large collections of his work include The Fogg Museum at Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His work, Fontaines du Grand Palais (Fountains of the Grand Palais), is in Museo cantonale d'arte of Lugano. His photographs of Jean Cocteau are on permanent display at the Jean Cocteau Museum in Menton, France. In the U.S., an exhibition of the Cocteau photographs was premiered at Westwood Gallery, New York City.
In 2007, the city of Arles honored Lucien Clergue and dedicated a retrospective collection of 360 of his photographs dating from 1953 to 2007. He also received the 2007 Lucie Award.Wikipedia