Marc Chagall, 1950

Denise Colomb  

Denise Lœb first turned towards a musical career. In the mid-1930s, the Lœb family followed the father, a maritime engineer, in his various positions. On the route to the Far East, at the Port Said stopover, Denise Colomb bought her first camera.

From 1935 to 1937, she traveled from Vietnam to Cambodia to China, paying particular attention to the daily life of the people she met but also to the grandiose landscapes offered by Halong Bay and the Great Wall of China.

On their return to France, the war and the Occupation opened a parenthesis in his budding career as a photographer. In 1942, she took refuge in Dieulefit under the name of Colomb. This explorer's name becomes his photographer's name. In 1947, she presented photographs taken in Indochina in her apartment. His brother, Pierre Lœb, founder of the Pierre gallery, allowed him to meet many artists. From then on, Denise Colomb produced portraits of artists who made her famous. Antonin Artaud, Giacometti, Picasso, Soulages, Miro and Nicolas de Staël all posed for her. From then on, his career oscillated between published reports and exhibitions, notably at the Le Minotaure gallery in 1947, at the Pierre gallery in 1957, at the Museum of Decorative Arts in 1969 or at the Pavillon des Arts in 1990.

She collaborates with various magazines (Le Leicaïste, Regards, Le Photographe, Réalités) and carries out commissioned work for Point de vue lmages du Monde. In 1948, Denise Colomb went to the West Indies, at the invitation of Aimé Césaire, and again in 1958. In France, she produced remarkable reports on the island of Sein (1950), the coachmen of Paris (1954) or the life of Les Halles (1954). She travels the world, and all her travels become so many series of photos.

The Denise Colomb donation to the State in 1991 was supplemented in 2001 with 1500 prints, several hundred color slides and 2300 negatives. Preserved at the MAP, the collection consists of more than 50,000 negatives accompanied by their contact sheets and 2000 signed period or modern prints.