Marcel Bovis, Montmartre, 1936, Heliogravure

Marcel Bovis (1904-1996)
Montmartre, 1936
Heliogravure by Pierre Brochet signed in pencil with dry stamp
Image: 21 x 21 cm; Sheet: 40 x 30 cm

Trained at the National School of Decorative Arts in Nice, Marcel Bovis became a decorator for Maurice Dufrène then for Paul Follot at the art and decoration workshop of Galeries Lafayette and at Bon Marché. Professional photographer from 1933, he collaborated with the writer Pierre Mac Orlan. He contributed in particular, until 1938, to the journal Arts et Métiersgraphiques. A professional man, he confronts the photographic genres of reporting, architecture, nudes, advertising and various experiments as evidenced by his collages and photomontages.

From 1936, the man who defined himself as a photographer-illustrator established close ties with publishers of tourist and cultural works for whom he worked until the beginning of the 1970s. After the war, he founded, in the company of a ten photographers like René-Jacques or Daniel Masclet, the Groupe des XV, an association of photographers active in the defense of the rights of the profession and in the organization of photographic art exhibitions.

To his work as a photographer is added the work of a theoretician and historian of photography. Bovies publishes numerous articles on photographic techniques for various general magazines such as Photo-Revue. He is also the author of 150 years of French photography (1979) and French Photographic Cameras (1993). He became a historian of photographic technique and participated in the creation of the French photography museum in Bièvres.

In 1992, Bovis donated his photographic work to the state. The Media Library of Heritage and Photography preserves this set composed of more than nineteen thousand black and white negatives, a set of color slides, black and white reading proofs, thematic binders of contact prints, prints of exhibition and correspondence. In 2019, his last partner bequeathed to the MPP his entire library, additional archives as well as a large set of prints.