Jean Dieuzaide, 1935-2003.

Jean Dieuzaide died in Toulouse (France), his city, on September 18, 2003. Along with Edouard Boubat, Robert Doisneau, Izis, and Willy Ronis, he belonged to the generation of photographers who defined the so-called French "Humanist School" of photography.

Born on June 20, 1921 in Grenade-sur-Garonne in the south-west of France, his experience in the French resistance during World War II won him the nickname of "Yan" with which he signed his photographs. As such he was given the opportunity to be the only photographer to document the liberation of Toulouse. He then started as a commercial photographer in that city working for advertising agencies, the local and national press, as well as various publishing companies, illustrating over 40 books. But what Yan is most renowned for is his crusade to establish photography as a serious art form in that part of France. If New York had its Stieglitz, Toulouse had Dieuzaide. His efforts culminated in the 1970s when he was first a key participant in the establishment of the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles (1970), and then when he convinced the City of Toulouse to let him turn a picturesque old red-brick pumping station on the left bank of the Garonne into an international photo-gallery--the first one of this scope in Toulouse, as well as in France. Prior to that he had already opened the first privately owned fine-art photo gallery in Toulouse. Opening in 1974, La Galerie Municipale du Chateau d'Eau de la ville de Toulouse showed and hosted the who's who of twentieth-century international photography in what is surely the only two-storey round gallery of the world. Toulouse, the fourth biggest city in France, would not be the same without it, its collection, its photography library, and without Jean Dieuzaide. A testimony of Dieuzaide's impact on the cultural life of the city is the fact that The Family of Man, Edward Steichen's famous international show at MoMA in 1955, had its last appearance outside Luxembourg in Toulouse a few years ago; the show in the Couvent des Jacobins was so popular then that it had to be prolonged by one month.

Jean Dieuzaide is the only photographer to be awarded the two most prestigious photography prizes in France: the Niepce Award (1955) and the Hadar Award (1961).

Although he had opened the first color processing lab in the region in 1951, Dieuzaide's heart was with fiber-based black and white photography, a medium he not only always used for his fine-art work but that he fiercely defended as well. In 1977 he launched a campaign that would soon become international against the invasion of resin-coated papers and the progressive disengagement of the world's biggest photo-manufacturing firms from the production and distribution of fiber-based papers. The rest is history, and unfortunately for them color film and prints, including Ilfochrome, may not find such an advocate.

His work of a lifetime as a fine-art photographer was finely crowned in December 2002 by a retrospective at the Pavillon des Arts in Paris. There, his most memorable series were on display (Mon aventure avec le brai (1956-1974), Portugal and Spain, Concorde) along with icons such as the portrait of Salvador Dali in water with only his head emerging and with his famous moustache literally in bloom. In 1994 an extensive and well-informed monograph on Jean Dieuzaide was published by Marval and edited by Jean-Claude Gautrand, another key player in the French photographic scene for over 50 years and a friend of the deceased.