Jean-Philippe Charbonnier

Jean-Philippe Charbonnier
Born	August 28, 1921 Paris, France
Died	May 28, 2004

Jean-Philippe Charbonnier (August 28, 1921 – May 28, 2004) was a French photographer whose works typify the humanist impulse in that medium in his homeland of the period after World War Two.

Jean-Philippe Charbonnier was born in Paris into a family of artists and intellectuals. His mother, Annette Vaillant was a writer and daughter of Alfred Natanson a.k.a. Alfred Athis, a founder of the Revue Blanche, and actress Martha Mellot; his father, Pierre Charbonnier, was a painter, and as a boy, Jean-Philippe met Max Ernst, Pierre Bonnard and the photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue. His parents separated and he was brought up by his stepfather, Gustave Moutet. At the Lycée Condorcet in Paris he studied philosophy, English and German, but at 18, Jean-Philippe received a camera from his father who encouraged him to become a photographer, and he discontinued his studies to work in the movie star portrait studio of Sam Lévin ('discoverer' of Brigitte Bardot). He left his hometown to follow Lévin to Lyon, Marseille and Toulon, then went into exile for two years in neutral Switzerland early in the Second World War, where he met with Jean Manevy who instructed him in the art of typography and journalism.

On return to France in 1944, Charbonnier worked for Théodore (Théo) Blanc (1891–1985) and Antoine (Tony) Demilly (1892–1964) in their darkrooms in Lyon, where he learnt how to print. At the end of the war he photographed, in the village of Vienne, near Grenoble, the execution of a Nazi collaborator in front of a crowd of five thousand people. In the late 40s, he became the chief typesetter for Liberation, and later France Dimanche. He also wrote for Point de Vue, where for the first time his photographs were published, in 1949, by editor Albert Plecy (1914-1977).

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