Francis Bruguière

Light Abstraction , 1925

Francis Joseph Bruguière (born October 15, 1879 in San Francisco , California , USA ; † May 8, 1945 in London , Great Britain ) was an American photographer . He has also worked as a director , producer, painter and sculptor .

However, he only remained important as a photographer. His images of the San Francisco earthquake are historical. Many of his other pictures also have an innovative character and make him one of the pioneers of modern photographic art before the First World War and in the years up to the Second World War .

Live and act

Francis Bruguière came from an upper-class family; he was of French descent and his parents had their own banking house in San Francisco. The boy received private lessons, was able to travel to Europe with his parents as a child and was very interested in art, music and poetry.

His parents were Emile Antoine Bruguière (1849-1900) and Josephine Frederikke Bruguière (née Sather) (1843-1915). His mother was the daughter of the Norwegian-American banker Peder Sather (1810-1886), to whom the professor title Sather Professor goes back. She was among the American fatalities in 1915 when the British ocean liner Arabic was sunk by a German submarine. One of his brothers was the yachtsman Louis Sather Bruguière (1882–1954), who was married to Margaret Post Van Alen (1876–1969), an art collector and member of the Vanderbilt family. The other two brothers were Peder Sather Bruguiere (1875-1967) and Emile Antoine Bruguiere, Jr. (1877-1935).

In 1905 he went to New York , where he first dealt with photography. He returned to San Francisco in 1906, where he founded his first photo studio. He witnessed one of the worst earthquakes in US history when the earth shook on April 18, 1906, killing more than 3,000 people. This influenced his life and his art. In spite of the destroyed city, he succeeded in studying photography with the photographer Frank Eugene in the same year. A friendship with the most important photographer in the USA at the time, Alfred Stieglitz , enabled him to take part in his photo sessions as a photographer. In 1916 he illustrated the book by his friend, poet George Sterling , entitled The evenscent City, with photographs from the Panama Pacific exhibition from 1915.

In 1919 he went to New York, where he again established his own photo studio at 16 West 49th Street and now finally worked as a freelance photographer, especially since all family members had to look for jobs because the family was impoverished in 1918. In addition, the theater enthusiast became a member of the New York Theater Guild and countless official photos of premieres, actors, sets and plays were taken that made him the most important theater photographer in the USA. Not infrequently he took photos on Broadway and many well-known off-Broadway theaters. In New York he also worked as a photographer for various important magazines, such as Vanity Fair , Harper's Bazaar and Vogue .

In 1928 he moved to London, where he lived until his death. There he became the director and producer of one of the first experimental art films, Light Rhythmus from 1931. There he also dealt with yoga , Taoism and the teachings of Carl Gustav Jung . In 1937 he finished his work as a photographer and tried - unsuccessfully - as a painter and sculptor. He died on the day of the outbreak of the end of the Second World War of complications from severe pneumonia . In 1977 a first biography was published, which extensively illuminated the artist's work and life: Bruguiere: His Photographs and his Life , by James Enyart.

Bruguière and Germany

During the Weimar Republic , Bruguière also had artistic relationships with Germany that have not yet been thoroughly explored. In 1928 he had a solo exhibition in Berlin . 11 pictures of him were shown in 1930 during an exhibition Revolution in Film and Photography in Stuttgart .

But the greatest importance was his collaboration with the German dancer and actor Sebastian Droste . This eccentric, drug addict, homosexual artist, who fled from what he considered to be a musty Weimar Republic, lived for some time in the "freer" New York. There he met Bruguière who took numerous photographs of him. Nude photos were also taken, but due to the prudish circumstances of the time, they were only vague. Bruguiere made the film The Way with Droste, which remained unfinished because the dancer died in 1927 while filming.

Earthquake Photograph

When the severe earthquake hit the city of San Francisco on April 16, 1906, killing more than 3,000 people, innumerable buildings were in ruins. Despite its morbidity, this rubble landscape inspired numerous photo artists. But no one had such a direct view of the city as Bruguière, who was a local and came from the city and knew many corners that were not familiar to the external photographers. His photographs culminated in the 1918 photo book San Francisco , which only showed photos of the city from the year of the earthquake. To this day, many of these photos are used worldwide for publications about the earthquake and are therefore of importance for the history of the earthquake and its documentation.

Innovative understanding of art

The pictures of Bruguière were often experimental and showed an idiosyncratic shadow technique, because shadows had an important meaning for him. His most important muse and partner was the actress Rosalind Fuller , who also often sat for him as a model and of whom he also took nudes. Many photos were taken under the impression of abstract, surrealistic or cubist creative methods. It was not uncommon for them to be double exposures , which, although not entirely new in this way, created a different understanding of photography in the form Bruguière used.

He was also involved in a number of exhibitions: he first exhibited at a community photo exhibition in 1908 in Oakland . In 1910 he took part in the International Exhibition of Pictoral Photography at the Buffalo Albright Art Gallery. In 1912 he had his first solo exhibition in San Francisco, which was organized by a local gallery. In 1910 and 1911 photographs appeared at the exhibitions of the American Annual of Photography . His greatest success followed, a solo exhibition in the New York Arts Center in 1927. In 1932 he was able to accommodate pictures in the photo book Few Are Chosen , which mostly only contained pictures of him.

Despite its important role as a photography pioneer during the first half of the 20th century, Bruguière was increasingly forgotten after the Second World War.

Web links

Commons : Francis Bruguière  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• www.luminous-lut.com/app/photographer/Francisc_Bruguiere
• Francis Bruguière on the Broadway Photographers website
• www.crivellilinejournal.com/227970.html?thread=1724034
• Francis Bruguière at Photography Collections Online