Denis Brihat - Inde - La voyageuse - 1955

DENIS BRIHAT, A PHOTOGRAPHER COMMITTED TO THE RECOGNITION OF HIS ART

Denis Brihat was born in Paris in 1928. Laureate of the Niépce prize in 1957, he paves the way for a generation of photographer-authors. He is one of the first to campaign for photography to be recognized as a full-fledged artistic expression, thanks to carefully made prints, numbered in small editions and often in large format.

From 1958 onward, the photographer abandons the capital to lead a frugal life close to nature in the Luberon. There he makes notable encounters, such as with Pablo Picasso or Fernand Léger, with whom he participates in the Groupe Espace, bringing together artists and architects in a shared ambition, that of the unity of art.

Regularly invited to the United States, he was one of the first French photographers to be exhibited by John Szarkowski in 1967 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, alongside his friends Jean-Pierre Sudre and Pierre Cordier.

Denis Brihat is also a fervent advocate of a democratic valuation of photography. He participates in the exhibitions of the Agathe Gaillard Gallery, one of the first photography galleries in Paris, opened in 1975. He is among the founders of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie festival in Arles with Lucien Clergue, and is also part of the Château d’eau in Toulouse project with Jean and Michel Dieuzaide.

Between visual lyricism and formal rigor

Over the years, Denis Brihat develops his visual research focus: the careful study of nature and, more particularly, the plant world. He sees, notably, his garden, which he cultivates with passion, as a metaphor for the world. Grounded in philosophy and literature, the artist is fascinated by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. He transposes the musical system of counterpoint in order to create, from the same motif—a vegetable, a flower, a tree, etc.—a true polyphony.

Great admirer of Edward Weston, close to American photographers Aaron Siskind, Paul Caponigro and Irving Penn, Denis Brihat photographs as close as possible to his subject of study – lichens, onions, poppies. Abstraction and the fragment form the bases of his visual syntax. The shift from microcosm to macrocosm is as important to him as the shift from black and white to color. His astonishing photographs, printed in black and white and then toned with a multiplicity of metals and pigments to approach as closely as possible natural color, attest to his experimental audacity. Denis Brihat asserts the materiality of the print and seeks excellence.

Purveyor of images and know-how, he quickly becomes an exemplar through his technical rigor: photographers from around the world come to follow, in his Bonnieux house-studio, the master's teaching, much as photographer Jean-Marc Bustamante, impressed by Denis Brihat's originality and the way, very early on, he chooses to highlight the pictorial and ornamental quality of photography. I