In Denise Bellon's work, each image seems carried by the movement of a gaze that never settles, curious about everything, attentive to the human as much as to form.
The Museum of Jewish Art and History (mahJ) is dedicating its first major retrospective to her today, "Denise Bellon: A Wandering Gaze," bringing together nearly 300 photographs, letters, objects, and publications. Spanning the interwar period to the 1970s, the exhibition restores this singular figure of French photography to the prominence she deserves.
Born in 1902 in Paris to a Jewish family originally from Alsace and Germany, Denise Hulmann (Bellon was her first husband's name) discovered photography at Studio Zuber before co-founding Alliance-Photo with Pierre Boucher, Émeric Feher, Pierre Verger, and René Zuber. The first photographic agency of the interwar period, it brought together photographers who ushered photography into the modern era. Influenced by the "New Vision," Bellon produced daring photojournalistic work in the Balkans, Finland, and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as highly inventive advertising commissions. Her images are distinguished by their rigorous composition, their attention to detail, and a light that reveals the beauty of reality without exaggeration.
When war broke out, her life changed. In 1940, she married Armand Labin, a Jewish journalist of Romanian origin involved in the Resistance. Taking refuge in Lyon, she concealed her Jewish identity and continued her work, photographing the city under the Occupation and creating a body of images of rare intensity, imbued with restraint and clear-sightedness. After the Liberation, she produced for midi libre – founded by her husband – a report on the Spanish Republican resistance fighters who took refuge in the Aude region. Then, in 1945, her work on the Jewish Scouts' house in Moissac, which sheltered Jewish children before welcoming orphans of the Holocaust, testifies to a profound humanism and a remarkable modesty.
In 1947, she brought back from Djerba an exceptional series on the island's Jewish community. There again, her gaze combined intimacy and distance, without exoticism or pathos. The attention she paid to gestures, faces, and light made each photograph a suspended scene, where time seemed to pause before resuming its course.
But Denise Bellon's work also represents an immersion in the world of art and Surrealism. Connected from adolescence to the Maklès sisters – Sylvia, future wife of Georges Bataille and then Jacques Lacan, and Rose, partner of André Masson – she frequented avant-garde circles from a very young age. From 1938, André Breton entrusted her with the photographic documentation of Surrealist exhibitions, a mission she continued until 1965. Her lens captured the faces and works of Victor Brauner, Frederick Kiesler, Wolfgang Paalen, and Sonia Mossé, as well as those of Jewish artists of the School of Paris such as Moïse Kisling, Kurt Seligmann, Antoine Pevsner, and Bezalel Schatz. She also photographed her writer friends: Joë Bousquet, Simone de Beauvoir, Joseph Delteil, Henry Miller, and Jacques Prévert.
Her familiarity with the film industry led her to capture the faces of Paul Grimault, Joseph Kosma, Nikos Papatakis, and the young Marcel Marceau and Serge Reggiani. This connection to the seventh art continued through her daughters: Yannick Bellon, a director, and Loleh Bellon, an actress and playwright. The last photographs of Denise Bellon, taken in 1972, were taken on the set of Someone, somewhere, a film directed by Yannick – a transmission that is both artistic and intimate.
The exhibition, conceived by Éric Le Roy and Nicolas Feuillie, retraces this exceptionally diverse career. It reveals an independent photographer, free from any system and possessing an insatiable curiosity, as attentive to distant lands as to the unusual aspects of everyday life. Visitors will discover a body of work where reportage, portraiture, and visual experimentation intersect. Breaking with the bourgeois conventions of her milieu, Denise Bellon invented a nomadic and sensitive gaze, both lucid and open, which can be found in the work of other photographers of her generation—Lore Krüger, Gerda Taro, Denise Colomb, and Gisèle Freund.
With A wandering gazeThe mahJ sheds light on a body of work that has long remained in the shadows. We perceive the trace of a life traversed by history, but guided above all by the freedom of vision – a vision that explores, bears witness and connects, always in search of humanity.
« Denise Bellon. A wandering gaze »
Museum of Jewish Art and History (mahJ)
71, rue du Temple, Paris 3e
From October 9, 2025 to March 8, 2026
