Denis Brihat - Inde - La voyageuse - 1955

DENIS BRIHAT, A PHOTOGRAPHER CHAMPIONING THE RECOGNITION OF HIS ART

Denis Brihat was born in Paris in 1928. Winner of the Niépce Prize in 1957, he paved the way for a generation of photographer-authors. He was among the first to campaign for photography to be recognized as an artistic medium in its own right, through carefully crafted prints, produced in small numbered editions and often in large formats.

As early as 1958, the photographer left the capital to lead a frugal life close to nature in the Luberon. There, he had memorable encounters with the likes of Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger, with whom he took part in Groupe Espace, bringing together artists and architects in pursuit of a shared ambition: the unity of art.

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

Denis Brihat was also a fervent advocate of making photography accessible to all. He took part in exhibitions at Galerie Agathe Gaillard, one of the first photography galleries in Paris, which opened in 1975. He was among the founders of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie festival in Arles, together with Lucien Clergue, and was also involved in the Château d’Eau in Toulouse with Jean and Michel Dieuzaide.

BETWEEN VISUAL LYRICISM AND FORMAL RIGOR

Over the years, Denis Brihat developed his visual line of inquiry: the close study of nature, and in particular the plant world. He saw his garden, which he cultivated with passion, as a metaphor for the world. Nourished by philosophy and literature, the artist was fascinated by the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. He adapted the musical system of counterpoint to create a true polyphony from a single motif—a vegetable, a flower, a tree, and so on.

A great admirer of Edward Weston and close to American photographers Aaron Siskind, Paul Caponigro and Irving Penn, Denis Brihat photographed his subjects—lichens, onions, poppies—at very close range. Abstraction and the fragment form the basis of his visual syntax. The transition from microcosm to macrocosm was as important to him as the shift from black and white to color. His remarkable photographs, printed in black and white and then toned using a variety of metals and pigments to come as close as possible to natural color, attest to his experimental daring. Denis Brihat asserts the materiality of the print and strives for excellence.

A transmitter of images and know-how, he quickly became a model for others through his exacting technical standards: photographers from around the world came to study under the master at his home and studio in Bonnieux, among them photographer Jean-Marc Bustamante, impressed by Denis Brihat’s originality and by the way he chose, from an early stage, to highlight photography’s pictorial and ornamental qualities. I