Tribute
Pierre Boulat
Pierre was not an artist, he was a photographer. He used to say: “I am like plumber, I just do my job, which happens to be photography”. A difficult, often unrewarding job which he did with rigour and passion. He took pictures every day, he saw, thought, talked and wrote about photography, and earned the freedom to photograph what he liked: life, men, women (in particular), his friends, the clouds, a mass suicide committed by suppositories.
Anything but war and destitution, because he could not bear other people’s hardships. Arthur Rubinstein, Yves Saint Laurent, the West Point Cadets, Polish miners, the smile on the face of a Virgin Mary painted by Fra Angelico·
He took all these pictures with equal pleasure, a pleasure that spanned six decades. But he never chose the most straightforward path.
Preview
I remember one summer, he had decided he was going to photograph the stars as they moved across the sky. He could simply have gone out and bought the appropriate lens, but no, he made one himself with a few bits and pieces from a game of meccano. We spent every August night out on the terrace with the camera pointed at the sky· This is also what photography was to him: having an idea (and heaven knows he had many), putting technology to work for him (and he made sure he did), taking pictures and sharing the results with the people around him (which he never failed to do). He liked photography and he enjoyed showing his own pictures.
It was neither egocentricity nor pretentiousness. It was simply his way of getting other people to share in his delight. And that is another thing he liked to share: the joy of living, of being free. The joy of hopping into his car and driving across Europe, getting into a twin-engine plane and risking his life, clambering over the hills of Southern Lebanon, his head covered in a keffieh, slipping into an anti-USA demonstration in China, to get a picture. Pierre's entire life is there, on the other end of his fish-eye or telephoto lens. He thought there was nothing more marvellous than spending hours in a basement trying to get the picture he had in his head: a fried egg landing on an unknown planet, under a laughing moon. It was no longer photojournalism, but it certainly was not art. He said it was a totally fabricated "space news item"; he had a wild imagination.
Because being a journalist is also about telling stories. And all stories deserved to be told, even the most bizarre of trivial facts. Today Pierre has gone to that new cosmos he dreamt about, where steel flowers with giant pistils replace the stars and send out particles that promote the survival of the photographer species.
"The crowning glory would be to die of cancer and be hailed as the king of photographers!" Pierre did not die of cancer, but as the result of an illness he had always feared and hated, Parkinson's disease. He was not hailed as the king of photographers, because there is no such thing. Now that he is gone, people simply say out loud what they thought in their hearts: he was a great man!
Annie Boulat
July 1998
