Collection: Édouard Boubat

Édouard Boubat (1923–1999) was a French photographer whose work, rooted in humanist documentary, moved across portraiture, travel, everyday life and the lyrical observation of women and children. He began publishing in Réalités in 1951 and became one of the defining figures of postwar French photography. From the late 1970s he turned increasingly to self-curated retrospective projects — Femmes, Miroirs, autoportraits, Boubat par Boubat — organising decades of dispersed images into authorial books. Marguerite Duras wrote the preface to Boubat par Boubat (1979); she had earlier used his photographs in India Song to stand in for a character physically absent from the film.