François Kollar

François Kollar (originally František Kollár ; born October 8, 1904 in Szenc , then Hungary; † July 3, 1979 in Créteil , southeast of Paris ) was a French fashion photographer of Hungarian origin.

Life

Kollar emigrated to France in 1924, where he initially worked at Renault . In 1927 he started as a photographer at Bernès, Marouteau & Cie, then switched to Draeger Frères , where he learned processes such as solarization and assembly and became workshop manager in 1928. The advertising recording of a gramophone for the Goodrich tire company in 1929 in the magazine L'Illustration caused a sensation and made it internationally known. In 1930 Kollar opened his first studio with the support of the American sculptor Jo Davidson and married Fernande Papillon on October 30th. In the following years Kollar published in magazines such as Harper's Bazaar , Plaisir de France , Die Dame , Le Figaro illustré , L'art vivant , Vendre , Voilà and VU , he worked for fashion designers such as Elsa Schiaparelli , Coco Chanel and Marcel Rochas , their models he brought out dramatic and extravagant lighting, and he photographed perfumes for Worth and Coty .

From 1931 onwards, Kollar traveled with a heavy wooden camera through over 40 French departments on behalf of the Horizons de France publishing house for four years, documenting the various professions using characteristic gestures and processes. This resulted in over 10,000 photographs, 1358 of which appear as heliogravures in 15 issues of the La France travaille publishing project .

In the 1930s Kollar took part in numerous exhibitions, he designed the pavilion français de la photographie at the 1939 World Exhibition in New York and realized remarkable night shots at the 1937 Paris World Exhibition . After the Second World War, which interrupted his work, he opened a new studio in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in the 9e arrondissement and continued to work for the press, so in 1951 he published an extensive photo report on West Africa. From the 1960s onwards, he increasingly devoted himself to industrial reporting. In 1965 he moved to Créteil, where he opened a photo shop.

His estate, consisting of 32,000 negatives and 3,000 prints from 1927 to 1965, was donated to the French state by Kollar's children, Jean-Michel, Marie-Françoise and Jean-Bernard in 1987 and is now owned by the Mission du Patrimoine Photographique .

Exhibitions

• 1981 Photographies 1928-1940 , Rencontres d'Arles
• 2004 Rétrospective , Magyar Fotográfusok Háza, Mai Manó Ház, Budapest [1]

literature

Illustrated books:

• Les Hommes de l'État: Cheminots des années 30 (Le Temps de la vapeur). La Vie du rail, Paris 1986, ISBN 2-902808-26-7 .
• La France travaille. Société des Amis de la Bibliothèque Forney, Paris 2000, ISBN 2-7012-0576-X .
• Nous étions des paysans. Éditions de La Martinière, Paris 2010, ISBN 978-2-7324-4129-0 .
• Les hommes de la Mer. Editions de La Martinière, Paris 2013, ISBN 978-2-7324-5064-3 .

Secondary literature:

• Françoise Denoyelle: François Kollar: Le choix de l'esthétique. Éditions La Manufacture, Paris 1995, ISBN 2-7377-0409-X .
• Ulrike Blumenthal: Kollár, François . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 81, de Gruyter, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-023186-1 , p. 216.
• Ulrich Pohlmann, Simone Förster (ed.): The elegance of the dictatorship. Fashion photographs in German magazines 1936–1943. Catalog of the exhibition of the same name in the Münchner Stadtmuseum November 9, 2001 to January 20, 2002. Wolf & Sohn, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-934609-03-1 , p. 68.

Web links

• François Kollar Retrospective

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www2.cndp.fr/themadoc/manray/Akollar.htm
2. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from December 19, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.