Edouard Boubat and the Misunderstanding of Superficiality

Madras, India, 1971 ©Edouard Boubat

There are photographers who are not very well known but have had their own path and a precise identity. You find them by rummaging through the used books in second-hand kiosks, between dust and oblivion. This is the case of Edouard Boubat for me.

I honestly confess that I have never heard of him before, and I took his book because the photo on the cover reminded me of the classic images of Willy Ronis or Giacomelli. Reading about him was very interesting and revealing, then, love at first sight for his photographs, which made me return home satisfied with the purchase.

And that's why I want to share it with you.

Born in Paris in 1923, he lived his childhood with his grandmother in the countryside with a sense of bucolic harmony which he will always carry with him.

At 23, he discovered photography, which led him to hold various exhibitions in Paris and to meet Robert Frank and Eugene Smith in 1949.

In the 1950s he began his long journeys as a correspondent, which would take him to the four corners of the world. From the United States to India, which he portrays several times, up to Hong Kong.  He died in France in 1999.

 

One of the turning points in his life and his photographic vision was his period as a photojournalist during the Second World War: he was so shocked that he decided to dedicate his art to the celebration of life. This is really evident in the photographs of him, and I feel it very close to me.

The book opens with a poem by his friend Jacques Prévert that perfectly captures the heart of his work, speaking of his stay in India:

        “Boubat lived there, he saw it all, and when he left,

        they said goodbye, as they say to a friend.

        This all seems even too simple in a world where

        everywhere the chroniclers of death and misfortune

        carry out their work amidst carnage and massacres.

        Boubat, on the contrary, in the nearest cities as in the lands

        more remote and in the infinite deserts of tedium, he seeks and finds oases.

        He is a correspondent of peace.”

In this way, he will be remembered as a correspondent for peace.

 

In fact, the impression he gave me when by leafing through the pages, placing the eyes on his images, is a sense of serenity and the search for sweetness that is not so far from my vision of photography.

As the critic Romeo Martinez writes well:

“The very nature of Boubat's photographs, lyrical, serene, legible, far removed from all that tragic that had been daily bread and life for too many years and from which everyone wanted to escape. However, in Boubat the preference for sweet and happy subjects was never a desire to escape, to escape from the hardness of life, but rather spontaneous obedience to his human nature, to a profound vocation.”

 

 

I have always considered my photographs the same way. I never stopped looking for serenity in every place I went, smiles more than tears, colors more than shadows. 

This may seem like a limitation. But Martinez also writes on the style of the French photographer, about the richness in his images of flowers, soft bodies, and breastfeeding maternal breasts, as if all this “is also the origin of a misunderstanding. In fact, many have read it and still read it on the surface, and mistake their superficiality for the superficiality of the photographer. Because Boubat's images are transparent, legible, finished, they have taken them for affected; because they are serene and lyrical, they are called evasive. They did not realize that those photographs reveal a continuous search for reality and an affirmation of sensitivity.”

This was the reason for Boubat's eclipse, being taken lightly, underestimated. The same fate that, as I have already written of, Olivier Föllmi suffers.  Not surprisingly, both photographers work on sweet and romantic registers.

Baubat's photographs of Mexico are the soft version of Tina Medotti's harsh ones. His India is made up of families at home and women frolicking in the sea of Madras. Children always play and smile. Senegalese girls are as sensual as the French ones.

 

“Maternity”, Paris, 1973 © Edouard Boubat

I find myself very much in this vision of life, rather than just photography. This is why I was struck by his images. It’s a pity that representing the positive and exciting side of life can become a limit; as if only the photograph that hits hard and shows pain or difficulty is noteworthy. But to well understand Boubat's vision it is better to leave his self-portrait to his words.

“All that I am today, I owe it to my encounters with friends, the models who posed for me, my travels-reportage...

There exists, in the magical moment that precedes every form of creation, a wonderfully fruitful moment, in which the artist stops in dismay, amazed: the daily vision of the world vanishes, dissolves, while the cry of surprise springs from the depths of the heart...

The opening of the diaphragm also corresponds to an opening of the heart and a focus of infinity. The universe opened before us: everything was yet to be discovered. Few books were circulating, television did not exist. Everything was new to our eyes: countries, villages, continents, sunrises and sunsets, even the photoshoots were new...

All light rays pass through the center of the lens which sometimes turns out to be as small as the eye of a needle. The stenoscopic photo is not focused on a precise point, it is open to the totality of vision. The background is never insignificant: subject and background harmonize in a synthesis. If the man is serene also the work will be serene, balanced.

To those who ask me ‘Why?’ I just reply, ‘Because I love.’

When I started taking photographs after the war, my eyes were wide open to reality, I felt an intense desire to know and investigate the whole world. You cannot learn the profession of a photographer. At that time, I was inventing my own path, creating it every moment: I hope to continue to create it again, every moment, every day that will come.”

 

“First snow”, Paris, 1955 ©Edouard Boubat

I must confess that, reading these lines, reminded me of the figure of Tiziano Terzani, one of the most famous reporters (and excellent photographer) in Italy, who has crossed the whole world, especially Asia, witnessing with his stories the most important – and often – cruel of those countries: from the revolt in the Philippines to the violence of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Vietnam, to its beloved Tibet, India. Especially in the beautiful book-interview-memory written with his son Folco on the verge of death, “The end is my beginning”.

Terzani also uses the same term as Boubat, replying to his son: “Now I'm curious. No, I'm not curious, I'm serene, Folco. I am serene. I don't expect anything at all.”

After having witnessed for decades the cruelties, the abuses, the wars in every corner of the world, he decided to retire for years to live alone in a cabin in the Indian Himalayas, before returning to die, sick, in his Orsigna, surrounded by family.

By now he had long ago espoused Hindu spirituality. He had found inner peace in the solitude of the mountains. Peace in the beauty of things that start over every time they finish. Serenity rather than happiness. Beauty in small gestures.

 

Mardras, India, 1971 ©Edouard Boubat

This idea that only conceptual images, strong, dramatic, deserve attention, relegating the simpler and more serene ones to the limbo of affectation or lightness, I consider profoundly unjust. Lightness is not superficiality. A mother who hugs and kisses her child is not affected but is part of the human game, it's another way of telling the reality, it's the serenity of those who enjoy observing even the leaves of a tree.

As Terzani wrote, when you are in the solitude of a hut on top of the Himalayas, even a match acquires a value you had never thought of before, and taking a leap makes you feel the presence of the wind. After the corpses in Cambodia, Mao, Vietnam, the wars, everything goes to zero in front of the infinite valley of the Himalayas.

The same journey that Boubat made. Try to tell reality with other tones, other shades. In a positive way, looking for beauty in kind gestures, in smiles. Even at the cost of appearing overly romantic or out of date.

But who cares, in the end. As the French photographer wrote: “The opening of the diaphragm also corresponds to an opening of the heart and a focus of infinity.”

And to those who ask me why you do it... The answer is simple and superficial, damn superficial: “Because I love.”

Edouard Boubat

Italian version