Édouard Boubat, French photographer and acknowledged classic of the humanist school

Édouard Boubat was a French photographer and an acknowledged classic of the humanist school. While his contemporaries recorded social cataclysms, Boubat deliberately sought in his viewfinder moments of pure joy, tenderness and everyday harmony.

Having survived the horrors of the Second World War and forced labour, he returned to his native Paris with a firm resolve to photograph life as a manifesto of gratitude for having been left alive. His career began in 1946 with the picture "Girl with Dead Leaves" in the Luxembourg Gardens, which became the author's calling card.

For more than twenty years Boubat travelled the globe as a leading reporter of the prestigious magazine Realites, and later continued on his way as an independent master whose merits were marked by the prestigious international Hasselblad Award.

Whether he was photographing Parisian lovers, playing children or chance passers-by in distant lands, his black-and-white frames always remained warm, poetic and deeply respectful of the human being. Today the master's legacy is studied all over the world, reminding us that even in the darkest of times there is always room in the world for light and beauty.