Jean Dieuzaide

The recorded working language is French. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are street, portrait, industrial and landscape. Positions recorded include Peintre de la Marine and director. Work by Jean Dieuzaide is recorded in the collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Distinctions recorded are Officer of the National Order of Merit, Officer of Arts and Letters, Niépce Prize and prix Nadar Gens d'images.

• Name — Jean Dieuzaide • Born — 20 June 1921 • Birthplace — Grenade, Haute-Garonne, France • Died — 18 September 2003 • Place of death — Toulouse, France • Other Names — Yan • Occupation — Photographer • Known for — Galerie du Château d'eau, Toulouse • Illustration — French photographer Jean Dieuzaide photographed at Arles in 1975

Dieuzaide was born on 20 June 1921 in Grenade, Haute-Garonne,[1] and at 13 was given a cardboard Coronet 6 × 9 camera. He attended secondary schools in Toulouse, Bordeaux, Cannes and Nice and during WW2 he photographed while in training camps in 1942 and documented young people in Provence. From this period, he signed much of his work ‘Yan’, his Resistance nickname, out of a concern that photography might not be a respectable occupation.[2] On the liberation of Toulouse he decided to make photography his vocation.

Commissioned in 1944 to produce documentary work by the Presidence du Conseil, Dieuzaide set up his first studio and made one of the first portraits of General de Gaulle.In 1946 following his exhibition at the Salon de la Bibliothèque National Editions Arthaud hired him to produce La Gascogne. His son Michel, also a photographer, was born 11 December 1951. He is famous for his 1951 portrayal of Salvador Dalí swimming at Cadaqués, his moustache decorated with daisies, and for the 1954 Life magazine assignment to photograph a tightrope walker couple's wedding for which he climbed astride the shoulders of one of the performers. He was profiled in 1964 in a television profile Chambre Noire by M. Tournier. • Illustration — Galerie Château d'eau Toulouse, April 1981. From left to right: Michel Tournier, Jean Dieuzaide, Michel Delaborde, Gisèle Freund (photo Michel Dieuzaide) Dieuzaide was a photographer in the French Humanist style and a member of Le Groupe des XV, and later of Les 30 x 40, and was the founder of the group 'Libre Expression', also practicing abstraction. Though Dieuzaide began as a photojournalist it was his travel and architectural photography that appeared in books from the 1950s. In the seventies he created the famous French gallery Le château d’eau, pôle photographique de Toulouse in an old water tower and dominated the photographic culture of the city of Toulouse in south-west France for over two decades.

Dieuzaide died on 18 September 2003 at his home 7, rue Erasme, Toulouse, France. Jean Dieuzaide's photographs were for the largest part given in September 2016 to Toulouse city, which keeps, classifies, scans and promotes the collection.