About This Image

Photographer's 28, Rue Henri Pape stamp, place (Londres), title (Cimetiere St. John) and date (1952) in ink on the verso. One of the most iconic images by Izis, and a scarce print.

Israëlis Bidermanas (January 17, 1911, Marijampole--May 16, 1980, Paris), who worked under the name of Izis, was a Lithuanian-Jewish photographer who worked in France and is best known for his photographs of French circuses and of Paris. Bidermanas arrived in France in 1930 to become a painter. In 1933 he directed a photographic studio in the 13th Arrondissement of Paris. During World War II, being a Jew, he had to leave occupied Paris. He went to Ambazac, in the Limousin, where he adopted the pseudonym Izis and where he was arrested and tortured by the Nazis. He was freed by the French Resistance and became an underground fighter. At that time he photographed his companions, including Col. Georges Guingouin.

Upon the liberation of France at the end of World War II, Izis had a series of portraits of maquisards (rural resistance fighters who operated mainly in southern France) published to considerable acclaim. He returned to Paris where he became friends with French poet Jacques Prévert and other artists. Izis became a major figure in the mid-century French movement of humanist photography--also exemplified by Brassaï, Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau and Ronis--with "work that often displayed a wistfully poetic image of the city and its people."

Encouraged by Brassai, he pursued a career as a professional photographer in peacetime, fulfilling commissions for Paris Match and befriending Jacques Prévert and Marc Chagall. He and Prévert were inveterate urban wanderers, and in 1952 they published ‘Charmes de Londres,’ delivering this vivid and poetic vision of the shabby old capital in the threadbare postwar years.

Meanwhile, his books continued to be popular with the public. Among the numerous books by Izis, Le Cirque d'Izis (The Circus of Izis), "published in 1965, but bearing the stamp of an earlier era", is perhaps his most notable. Shot mostly in Paris but also in Lyon, Marseilles and Toulon, the photographs are "affectionate and nostalgic, but also deeply melancholic" with "a desolate undercurrent", forming a work that is "profound, moving and extraordinary".

See: Jacques Prévert "Izis. Charmes de Londres", La Guilde du Livre, Lausanne, 1952, p.61; Izis and Borhan, Retrospective Izis (1988), p.57; cassette-album cover for Pterygium–Digging a Ditch of Mercy (Cloister Recordings 2022); Steichen and Sandburg, Family of Man, p.138.

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