Mur 005, 2021

Sophie Bassouls  

Sophie Bassouls, born in June 1936 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, is a French photographer who notably directed the photo service of L'Express and Le Figaro Littéraire and covered literary news for the Sygma agency. Over the years, it has thus built up an extremely rich collection of portraits of writers and artists. 

Born June 9, 1936 in Neuilly-sur-Seine1, Sophie Bassouls is the daughter of François Daniélou, himself the son of Charles Daniélou (1878-1953), poet and politician and of Madeleine Clamorgan (1880-1956) founder of a group of private schools for young girls. 

As a child, she was brought up by her grandmother, who wanted "to promote only intelligence" and gave her a taste for books and writing, within certain limits however: thus she threw Jean Genet's college Sainte-Marie Querelle de Brest in the furnace, but after having read it, thus giving her granddaughter a furious desire to discover Genet ... 

She experienced her first shock with photography at The Family of Man exhibition which presented at the end of the war, from a humanist perspective, a vast photographic inventory of human life in more than sixty countries, by the greatest photographers of the world. era (Bill Brandt, David Seymour, Cartier-Bresson, Capa, etc.). 

Hybrid studies first in an English college - where she learned Italian ... - then the University of Florence to take art history courses before going to the United States to study American literature and find Claude Bassouls, her future husband, with whom she will have two sons, Élie and Julien. 

Among many exhibitions of his work, the one dedicated to him at the Historical Library of the city of Paris in 2001 gave rise, the same year, to the publication of a book, Writers, at Flammarion, which brought together 550 portraits of writers. 

Today, his work uses mixed techniques (montages, painting, gold leaf) coordinated with digital tools of retouching, transformation, replication of images and is oriented towards new themes: explorations of cities and human bodies . She contributes regularly to the journal Area and publishes, in each issue, portraits of artists and personalities.