Photographer Gaston Paris Rediscovered at the Centre Pompidou

Gaston Paris (1903-1964) produced several thousand images in the French press between the wars, but has hitherto been overshadowed by his contemporaries André Kertész, Roger Parry and Germaine Krull. We owe the rediscovery of this photographer to Michel Frizot, historian of the medium and co-curator of an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou devised with Florian Ebner (Curator of the Photography Department), which also sheds light on the hidden side of his own work. A happy coincidence led this pioneer in the history of photography in France—the first to hold a chair dedicated to the discipline at the École du Louvre—to take an interest in Gaston Paris. It all began in the 1990s with a box containing some unsigned 1930s prints bought at an exhibition: "I'm not a collector in the sense that I'm not looking for something specific, but I've always based my knowledge as a historian on collecting things, and have done so since the 1970s," says Frizot, who initiated the 1977 exhibition on Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) at the Centre Pompidou. But with Gaston Paris, nothing was premeditated. Everything here…