Few photographers travelled as creatively as Francis Bruguière through the artistic movements of 20^th century, producing remarkable images every step of the way. He maintained a highly experimental approach throughout his long artistic career, and challenged accepted notions of what a photograph could be. In the photograph offered here, Bruguière employed the technique of solarization which he described in 1935 as ‘the most promising process in the hands of the modern photographer.’ Solarization involved the introduction of light to the print during the development process; the resulting selective reversal of tones transformed the image from a straightforward photographic document into a dreamlike tableau hovering between visual legibility and abstraction. This tension between realism and abstraction was consistent throughout Bruguière’s work.

Francis Bruguière, Self Portrait, circa 1935

Born in San Francisco, Bruguière studied painting in Europe and then settled in New York City in 1905 where he studied photography with Frank Eugene. His early work, done in his own variation of the Pictorialist style, earned him acclaim. He was befriended by Alfred Stieglitz who made him a member of the Photo-Secession. Stieglitz reproduced one of his images in Camera Work, and four photographs were included in the groundbreaking 1910 International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography in Buffalo.

“A photograph can be something in itself—it can exist independently as a photograph apart from the subject; it can take on a life of its own, aside from its documentary value.”
—Francis Bruguière

In the early 1920s Bruguière worked for Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, and Vanity Fair, while at the same time pursuing his own increasingly experimental creative work. He is credited with making some of the first intentionally abstract photographs with his cut-paper works and the light studies made from Thomas Wilfred’s Clavilux projector in the 1920s. This new phase of his work was shown in the 1929 Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany. Just as the 1910 Buffalo exhibition articulated a definitive statement on the fine art photography of its day, Film und Foto did the same for the vastly modernized photography produced between the world wars. Bruguière was one of the very few photographers to have his work shown in both venues. In subsequent years, Bruguière’s photographs were featured in no fewer than ten exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, notably Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) and Abstraction in Photography (1951). He also worked extensively in film, and his unfinished work, The Way, has become legendary in the history of experimental cinema.

Francis Bruguière’s work, far right, shown alongside that of Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy in Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936, The Museum of Modern Art
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- Provenance
  Charles Isaacs Photographs Inc., New York, 2008
- Literature
  Enyeart, Bruguière, pl. 104