Yvette Troispoux

Yvette Troispoux (1914–2007) was a French photographer known as the "photographer of photographers" for her pictures taken unobtrusively at photography exhibitions and social events. Her extensive body of work, built up over seventy years, also includes photographs of people in everyday settings in the "humanist” tradition. After her death, the French National Library acquired her archives for its collections.

Early life She was born on 1 June 1914 to a middle-class family in Coulommiers. When she was nineteen she used her savings to buy an Agfa box camera that allowed her to make 6cm x 9cm prints. The first shot she took was in a local park, the Parc des Capucins. Soon after that, the self-taught young woman entered a local photography competition and won first prize: a Kodak Pronto. One of her best-known photographs from these early years, and her most treasured, is the picture of her brother Jean at Montparnasse railway station before he left for Algeria.

Her photographs are not all from the artistic world of private views and gatherings of celebrated photographers. Many are images of ordinary human beings going about their lives: on the banks of the Seine, or in the countryside. Commentators have suggested she created “poetic shots full of tenderness” or a “delicate poetry” comparable to work by Édouard Boubat. In this, she belonged to the humanist photography movement.

In 1971 she got recognition from fellow artists when she won the Paris photography society's Grand Prix. a warm nature and a free spirit.

Legacy An exhibit at the 2012 retrospective with a photograph taken on a journey to Algeria to bring Jean Troispoux' body home. Troispoux died on 11 September 2007 at the age of 93. When her archives were offered at auction in 2008, the French National Library (Bibliothèque nationale de France, also known as BnF) exercised its right to acquire them in order to prevent their dispersal, since they considered these archives to have a special importance in the history of photography in France in the second half of the 20th century. Well-wishers and friends who were present applauded this moment in the saleroom. The library now owns all her negatives and contact sheets, her personal archives and a series of her early photographs. Gaillard bought several classic Troispoux photographs at the auction and donated them to the BnF department of prints in memory of their creator. A researcher was funded for a year to work with the collection, and this led to the publication of Mademoiselle Yvette Troispoux by Céline Gautier and Aurélie Aujard (Contrejour 2012). In the same year a retrospective exhibition at the Musée du Montparnasse invited a range of Troispoux' photographer friends to select their own personal favourites from the collection for public viewing.