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• Blanc et Demilly: Modernists from Lyon

Bed of the River (Le Lit du Fleuve)

Born a year after his photographic partner, in 1892, Antoine Demilly met Theodore Blanc after they each married daughters of Edouard Bron, who ran a studio in Lyon from 1893.

Demilly was Bron's apprentice and Blanc was a keen amateur photographer, and the two men shared a single photographic identity (Blanc et Demilly), taking over Bron's studio at 31 rue Grenette in 1924 and maintaining it until 1962, when they closed the business.

The space boomed under their direction, employing up to 30 people, and from the 1920s they established themselves through innovative use of portable and discreet Leica and Rolleiflex cameras.

The pair exhibited at the first French national photography exhibition a year after the end of WWII, and later sat on the jury between 1947 and 1959.

The pair worked with portraiture, still life, architecture, nudes, abstraction, surrealism and reportage, pushing the boundaries of the medium into modernism.

They were also prolific peers of the likes of Brassai, Doisneau and Man Ray, publishing dozens of books and photographic journals.

Many of their prints are preserved in the collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée de Chalon-sur-Saône, which is the birthplace of Niepce.