Jacques Vauclair (1926-99) started working in photography at Studio Harcourt in 1946. Set up to meet the needs of the press in 1934, the studio had developed into a leading portrait studio with a fairly distinctive film-style lighting and posing. It’s “trademark style” continues in use to the present day by the studio, still offering its services. To me it recalls the worst of Hollywood photography of the era in which it is founded.
You can find the site easily on Google, by typing in ‘Studio Harcourt’. As well as some pictures it contains one of the most restrictive ‘Legal Notices’ I’ve seen on the web which probably means I’m not even allowed to tell you about it or hint at its existence and certainly can’t link to it. Google are big enough to ignore such things – as they do.
Like much film lighting of the period, it was done to make people look as if they were in a film, very much in the spotlight. To my eyes, used to a more realist approach it seems impossibly stagey and false, incredibly dated. Light should generally be sympathetic and help to describe the subject, not overpower it, and certainly not to the extent that the actual subject becomes almost immaterial.
Vauclair, to his credit, didn’t quite seem to fit Harcourt, though it was ten years before he left to set up Studio Vauclair, next to the famous Olympia concert hall. For the next five years or so he was the photographer to be photographed by in Paris, particularly for actors, actresses, singers (even then they didn’t call female singers singesses) and the young unknowns who became a part of the French ‘New Wave’ cinema.
Although many of the stars he photographed may be better known in France, even I’ve head of some of them, including figures such as Charles Trenet, Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens, Jean Marais, Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Pierre Léaud.
Looking through the large cellar gallery of Le Centre IRIS, its walls covered with images – or the book that accompanies the show – its hard not to be impressed by the sheer volume. There are some interesting portraits, particularly of the singers, but too many are let down by either the lighting of the printing I think many were modern prints from his negatives) or both. Frankly there were quite a few images on show that had a student brought them out of the darkroom to show me I would have made a few suggestions and sent them back to try and do better. But then perhaps I don’t understand his version of that trademark style.
For Vauclair, the time was the most beautiful years of his life, and it was his luck to mix with the greatest artists of this unique era. It gave him great professional and personal satisfaction. But eventually gave up professional photography to pursue a second very successful career as a songwriter. His work in this show is valuable as a fine record of the period and milieu in which he worked and the way he lit and took pictures is also very much of its time. But I do hope there are no photographers out there today who think it a style worth emulation.