10e édition du Grand Prix Photo de Saint-Tropez - Exposition Lucien Clergue

The Grand Prix Photo association invites you to discover "La passion du Sud", a selection of some thirty photographs by Lucien Clergue, the first photographer to join the Académie des Beaux-Arts. After his adolescence and the start of his artistic career were thwarted by the war, Lucien Clergue managed to conquer his freedom and devote himself fully to his passion for photography (which he had always shared with his passion for the violin).

After leaving the factory where he had worked to support his mother since the age of 15, he established himself as a freelance photographer in 1959. His meetings with Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, the godfathers of his true beginnings, proved decisive in this "great leap". Cocteau drew inspiration from Lucien Clergue's photographs for the frescoes in the Chapelle Saint Pierre in Villefranche-sur-mer, and to thank him, invited him to take the photographs for his film, Le Testament d'Orphée.

Thanks to two collector patrons, Lucien Clergue will be able to carry out his own research without having to join an agency or collaborate with a press organization.
His work delves into the secrets of life and death through his scenes of bullfighting, acrobats, carrion, cemeteries - his favorite subjects from the early days. Then bullfighting, the female nude, the Camargue landscape, portraits of personalities (Picasso, Jean Cocteau, St John Perse...) became the leitmotivs of a universe that was at once particular and universal: claiming his roots in his native Arles, as evidenced by his research on the gypsies, his work simultaneously conveys a universality linked to a timeless exploration of nature, the female body, and the places and gestures where human life has been lived since time immemorial.