It may be surprising to look at a black and white picture of a fashion model that may have been taken many decades ago for an early glamorous magazine and then at a black and white photograph of people working on an assembly line in a factory and realise that, rather than being taken by two different photographers – one specialised in fashion and another focusing on reportages and industrial photojournalism – they were actually produced by the same person. Yet François Kollar wasn't just one of the main exponents of industrial photojournalism, but was also into experimental and arty photomontages.
People interested in rediscovering him will be able to do so via a retrospective entitled "A Working Eye" currently on at the Jeu de Paume, Paris. The event features 130 photographs by Kollar, some of them previously unseen, and further documents, magazines and materials donated by the Kollar family to the French state in 1987.
Born in Szenc, Hungary, in 1904 (now the Slovakian town of Senec) Kollar first worked on the railways in his native country. Before becoming a professional photographer at the age of 24, he worked as a lathe operator at Renault's Boulogne-Billancourt factory.
Kollar had therefore developed an in-depth knowledge of the industrial world that allowed him to portray tools, materials and workers' gestures with an exceptionally professional expertise.
The photographer got married and opened his studio in 1930 in Paris; his wife Fernande Papillon, his first model, was also his collaborator. In his early days Kollar mainly produced self-portraits and photomontages, then he started working for advertising agencies, luxury brands and major fashion houses including Hermès, Molyneux, Oméga, Christofle and Worth et Coty perfumes, while also taking portraits of celebrities as Edith Piaf, and Charles Trenet. Kollar remained a favourite photographer of the fashion industry since he had a special eye for the use of chiaroscuro and texture in his compositions.
Amongst his circle of close friends and associates at the time there were Maximilien Vox, a graphic artist and photomontage technician, Paul Iribe, a draughtsman and graphic designer at Draeger's, and Christian Bérard, a painter, illustrator and decorator.
At the time, inspired by Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray Kollar carried out various experiments with original compositions using backlighting, double exposures, overprinting and solarisation: one extremely modern advertising study shows a photomontage with Marie Bell and a record; an advert for a Hermès typewriter featured a feather delicately perched on the "K", a subtle and clever reference to his surname, but a wonderful marketing idea that hinted at the lightness and functionality of the machine.
Kollar produced different series of images for many magazines from those times, among them L'Illustration, VU, Voilà, Le Figaro Illustré and Plaisir de France, and collaborated with Harper's Bazaar until the mid-'50s, often shooting images on location. As part of the "Théâtre de la Mode" travelling exhibition, Kollar also took photos of dolls dressed by the period's greatest fashion designers.
The first part of the exhibition mainly looks at experimental portraits, work for advertising firms and the fashion industry (among the others there is a picture of the model Muth donning a peculiar headdress with two large spheres uncannily similar to Mickey Mouse ears that make her look as if the image had been taken in our modern times…).
In 1930, after exhibiting at "Das Lichtbild", an international photography exhibition in Munich alongside Florence Henri, André Kertész, Germaine Krull and Ergy Landau, François Kollar received a major commission from a publishing company, Horizons de France, entitled "La France travail" (1931-1934).
He produced for this publisher fifteen booklets that could be considered as visual documentary investigations about various sectors from agriculture to steel, maritime and electricity production that looked at issues such as serial production, standardisation and the rationalisation of production. Kollar's photographs, divided by different themes corresponding to various raw materials (coal, iron, glass, textiles, etc) were used to illustrate texts by popular authors from the period – Paul Valéry, Pierre Hamp, Lucien Favre – dealing with the main professions in the French industry.
Kollar photographed men and women at work, chronicling the profound changes society was going through between the 1930s and the '60 and anticipating in this way studies that investigated the meaning of work that came out decades later (think about Studs Terkel's books).
This is the core part of the exhibition: vintage prints, slideshows and archival publications take visitors behind the lenses of Kollar's images, and onto a discovery journey from the deck of a ship where workers riveted metal sheets to the rooms where women cleaned miners' lamps. A gigantic enlargement of one of his portraits of a worker was used to decorate the French pavilion at the 1939 New York World Fair.
During the German occupation Kollar left the public eye, moving with his wife and three children to the Poitou-Charentes region and returning to photography in 1945. He was still in demand and photographed celebrities such as Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli and the Duchess of Windsor.
When his collaboration with Harper's Bazaar came to an end, he covered more industrial subjects in France and abroad. This section of the exhibition features indeed images regarding a 1951 commission from the French State for a report on French West Africa (now Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal), plus a series of images detailing the work of the Union Aéromaritime de Transport, in the potash mines of Alsace, at Moulinex and Christofle.
All the selected images on display prove that Kollar combined sensitivity and detachment when he portrayed his subjects, but he had a special gift when he focused on industrial environments, tools and materials. "A Working Eye" recasts Kollar as the spirit of modern times, a versatile artist with a natural curiosity, and offers visitors with very different interests – from fashion to ship building – the chance to be equally engaged by the same event.
Curators Matthieu Rivallin, Collections Officer at the Paris-based Médiathèque de l‘architecture et du patrimoine, and Pia Viewing, researcher at the Jeu de Paume, also opted to include in the programme of events accompanying the exhibition short films made by young directors – "After the Bell d'Emma" and "Fragments on Machines" by British artist Emma Charles, and "A trama e o Círculo" (The Mesh and the Circle) by Mariana Calo and Francisco Queimadela (scheduled on 8th March), and "IPHONECHINA" by Christian von Borries (on 15th March). The latter is an intriguing visual document in which the director asked workers at the Apple factory in China, "If Apple was a state, would you rather live in Apple or in China?" and creates the ultimate juxtaposition between work in Kollar's images and work in our modern times.
"François Kollar: A Working Eye", Jeu de Paume, 1 Place de la Concorde, Paris, France, until 22nd May 2016. The exhibition will be presented at the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava from June 9 to September 11, 2016
Image credits for this post
François Kollar, Eiffel tower, circa 1930, vintage gelatin silver print, MNAM/CCI, Centre Pompidou, Paris, inv. AM 2012-3429. Achat grâce au mécénat d’Yves Rocher, 2011. Ancienne collection Christian Bouqueret
François Kollar, Garlic flower, 1930's, vintage gelatin silver print (photogram),29.4 x 22.6 cm, donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l'architecture et du
patrimoine, Charenton-le-Pont
François Kollar, Advertising study for "Magic Phono", a photomontage portrait of Marie Bell, 1930, donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l'architecture et du patrimoine, Charenton-le-Pont.
François Kollar, Advertisement for a Hermès typewriter, 1930, vintage print, 30,1 x 23,7 cm, donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l'architecture et du patrimoine, Charenton-le-Pont.
François Kollar, The model Muth, Balenciaga, 1930's, vintage print, 29 x 22,4 cm, donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l'architecture et du
patrimoine, Charenton-le-Pont.
François Kollar, Staircase at Chanel, 1937, vintage gelatin silver print, 29 x 21.9 cm, donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l'architecture et du patrimoine, Charenton-le-Pont
François Kollar, Construction of the large liners, riveting the metal sheets on the deck of a ship, Saint-Nazaire shipyard, Penhoët, 1931-1932, vintage gelatin silver print, 28.9 x 23.5 cm, donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l'rchitecture et du patrimoine, Charenton-le-Pont
François Kollar, Alsthom: assembling the flywheels for Kembs hydroelectric power plant. Société Alsthom, Belfort (Territoire de Belfort), 1931-1934, photographic plate, 18 x 13 cm, coll. Paris, Bibliothèque Forney, © François Kollar / Bibliothèque Forney / Roger-Viollet
François Kollar, Cleaning the lamps. Société des mines de Lens, Lens (Pas-de-Calais), 1931-1934, vintage gelatin silver print, 18 x 24 cm, coll. Paris, Bibliothèque Forney © François Kollar / Bibliothèque Forney / Roger-Viollet
François Kollar, The sorter still pays attention to her appearance. Société des mines de Lens, Lens (Pas-de-Calais), 1931-1934, vintage gelatin silver print, 18 x 24 cm,, coll. Paris, Bibliothèque Forney © François Kollar / Bibliothèque Forney / Roger-Viollet
François Kollar, At the source of energy. Neon lights. Paris,1931, vintage gelatin silver print, 13 x 18 cm, coll. Paris, Bibliothèque Forney, © François Kollar /
Bibliothèque Forney / Roger-Viollet
François Kollar, Renault. With one hand, the worker drops the sand. Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine), 1931-1934, photographic plate, dimensions (negative): 13 x 18 cm, coll. Paris, Bibliothèque Forney, © François Kollar / Bibliothèque Forney / Roger-Viollet
François Kollar, Bata shoes factory, Rufisque (Senegal), 1951, vintage gelatin silver print, 22,6 x 24,8 cm, donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l‘architecture et du patrimoine, Charenton-le-Pont
François Kollar, Untitled [Press-forming cutlery, Christofle factory, France],1950, vintage gelatin silver print 30 x 21,6 cm, donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l'architecture et du patrimoine, Charenton-le-Pont
François Kollar, Untitled [Manufacturing food mills, Moulinex factory, Alençon (Orne)], 1950's, vintage gelatin silver print, 29,6 x 21,6 cm, donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l'architecture et du patrimoine, Charenton-le-Pont
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