(Arles, august, 14, 1934 – Nimes, november 15, 2014)
Lucien Clergue was a French photographer, member of the Academy of Fine Arts of the Institut de France.
At the age of seven he started playing the violin but only for a few years since his teacher could not continue teaching him and his parents could not afford to study at the conservatory either. He began learning photography in 1948. Four years later, during a bullfight in his hometown, he had the opportunity to show his photos to Pablo Picasso who was delighted with them and asked him to show him more, so during a year and a half he was sending him photographs. On November 4, 1955 he met Picasso in Cannes with whom he had a great friendship from then on and to whom he dedicated the book Picasso mon ami.
In 1954 he received popular recognition for making a series of portraits in which fifty actors made a representation of Julio César. He also made a series on bank jumpers that had the ruins of the Second World War in Arles as a stage, as well as another on dead animals. However, it was the series “Nudes at sea” made in 1956 that gave him the most prestige, since he carried out an innovation in erotic photography. The following year he illustrated the book “Memorable Bodies” with the poems of Paul Éluard and soon after an extensive report on the Camargue ecological reserve that is close to his hometown, in that series of photographs he worked on the proximity of nature seen in a dimension of “photographed object”.
He also dealt with bullfighting themes in his photography and collaborated in films like Jean Cocteau’s “The Orpheus’s Will” or in another film about Pablo Picasso.
In 1968 he founded the Arles International Photography Encounters in collaboration with his friend Michel Tournier and the historian Jean-Maurice Rouquette that offer a vision of photographic work in the international arena and in which he held the position of artistic director for 25 years. Since 1976 he has been teaching at the University of Provence and has also been a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York.
He made numerous exhibitions and his work is in collections such as the National Library of France, the Folkwang Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Ludwig Museum or the Réattu Museum in Arles.
In 2000 he received the Higashikawa Prize in Japan, in 2003 he was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honor and on May 31, 2006 he was appointed member of the Academy of Fine Arts by creating a new section on photography, in his Initial speech was about the history of photography.
In 2014 he died in Nimes at the age of 80.
SOME PHOTOS
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