Collection: Lucien Clergue

Lucien Clergue (1934–2014, Arles) was a French photographer whose practice from the early 1950s onwards developed a body of work rooted in the landscapes, rituals and bodies of Provence and the Camargue. Self-taught and working initially outside institutional structures, Clergue came to the attention of Pablo Picasso in 1953 — a meeting that initiated a friendship and collaboration lasting until Picasso’s death in 1973 — and subsequently of Jean Cocteau and Paul Éluard, both of whom contributed to his early publications.

His 1957 book Corps mémorable, with poems by Éluard, a cover by Picasso and an introductory poem by Cocteau, established his position at the intersection of photography and the French literary and artistic avant-garde. His photographs of bullfighting, the Camargue marshes, nudes among waves and ruins, and the bodies of the dead combined formal rigour with an intense engagement with mortality, eroticism and the elemental. In 1961 Edward Steichen included him in Diogenes with a Camera V at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, alongside Bill Brandt and Yasuhiro Ishimoto.

His solo exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Pavillon de Marsan, Paris, in 1962 — the first major institutional survey of his work — marked his entry into the international museum circuit. Clergue was a co-founder of the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival in 1970 and in 2006 became the first photographer elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. His work is held in major collections internationally.