Denise Bellon: A wandering eye at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme

Born in Paris in 1902, Denise Bellon helped found Alliance Photo, the leading photographic agency of the interwar period. Influenced by the aesthetics of the "New Vision", she produced numerous reportages in the Balkans, Finland and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as creative advertising commissions.

Concealing her Jewishness in Lyon during the Second World War, Denise Bellon continued her work there, leaving a remarkable collection of images of the city under the Occupation. At the end of 1944, she covered the Spanish Republican maquis in Aude for Midi libre, founded by her husband Armand Labin, at the request of the Mouvement de libération nationale. In 1945, she produced a moving report on the Éclaireurs israélites house in Moissac, which was a refuge for Jewish children until 1943, and took in orphans from the Holocaust after the Liberation.

In 1947, she brought back from Djerba a remarkable collection of images of the island's Jewish community.

André Breton entrusted her with the coverage of Surrealist exhibitions from 1938 to 1965. Denise Bellon also left portraits of numerous Jewish artists from the Paris School and writers with whom she was close, including Simone de Beauvoir, Paul Bénichou, Joseph Delteil, Henry Miller and Jacques Prévert. Thanks to her familiarity with the film world, we also meet the faces of Paul Grimault, Joseph Kosma, Nico Papatakis, or the young Marcel Marceau and Serge Reggiani. Her daughters also had careers in the cinema, Yannick as a director, and Loleh as an actress and playwright. In 1972, Denise Bellon's last works were photographs of the filming of Quelque part quelqu'un, directed by Yannick.

Exceptionally diverse, her work is characterized by a strong independence in the world of photography, and a great curiosity, both for the "elsewhere", as seen in her reportages abroad, and for the unusual close to home, whether it be a gypsy wedding in the Zone still surrounding pre-war Paris, or surrealism, whose evolution she followed. Breaking with the bourgeois conventions of her family, she took a wandering look at the world that was shared by other Jewish photographers of her generation, such as Lore Krüger, Gerda Taro, Denise Colomb and Gisèle Freund.