Jean Marquis

The Galerie Roger-Viollet explores the work of Jean Marquis for the first time. A selection of 110 contemporary prints, offered in a limited edition of 30 copies.

In 1951, Robert Capa advises Jean Marquis (1926-2019), an actor and drama workshop leader, to look into photography. He has an eye for it. Three years later, he joins the Magnum Photos agency alongside Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Chim.

From streets to fields, from factories to haymaking, from Liverpool to Budapest, from Algerian settlers to the camel drivers of the Touggourt market and the Clos Salembier shantytown (1958), Jean Marquis documents everyday life: a press review by Pierre Mendès France on a train, bread-making in the village, acting direction by Jean Renoir for French Cancan.

Jean Marquis orders the space, arranges his figures and frames them with masterful skill: the hard-working crowd from Merlebach returning home, old women with a devastating gaze from the rue du Petit Musc, a solitary railway worker along the Deûle, his first major "initiatory" report for Magnum.

The photographs impose themselves with the obviousness of their slice of life: symbols of ancestral customs in Corrèze, testimonies to the modernity of the Trente Glorieuses, documents of the persistence of struggles.

Edward Steichen, director of the photography department at MoMA, spots him and selects him for the exhibition La Grande Famille des hommes (The Family of Man) in 1955. Numerous retrospectives in institutions in France and abroad follow.

Jean Marquis covers the social and artistic ferment: wildcat strikes, meetings in workplaces, and demonstrations in support of causes close to his heart. In Paris, at the Place de la Nation, he photographs support for the Rosenbergs on death row in the United States (1953); the burial of demonstrators for peace in Algeria; the victims of repression at the Charonne metro station (1962); the social unrest of May 1968; a general assembly of farmers (1983). Jazz, shows and film shoots also feature: he is there at every rendezvous with History.