A unique interactive exhibition is asking visitors what musical compositions come to mind when viewing "Corposano," a striking 1939 photograph by French photographer Denise Bellon taken at the Trocadéro Esplanade in Paris. Throughout the week, listeners of the French radio program "Allegretto" have suggested musical pieces inspired by the image, including works by Steve Reich, Dmitri Shostakovich, Gilbert Bécaud, Erik Satie, Béla Bartók, and Arthur Honegger.
The photograph is featured in a comprehensive retrospective titled "Denise Bellon: A Wandering Gaze," running from October 8, 2025, to March 8, 2026, at the Museum of Jewish Art and History (mahJ) in Paris. This marks the first major retrospective dedicated to Bellon (1902-1999), who was one of France's greatest 20th-century photographers and a pioneer of photojournalism whose career spanned from the 1930s to the 1970s. The exhibition brings together nearly 300 photographs, objects, letters, and publications documenting her extraordinary life and work.
Born in Paris to a family from Alsace and Germany, Denise Hulmann helped found the Alliance Photo cooperative in 1934, which became the first major photo agency of the interwar period. Influenced by the aesthetic of the "New Vision" movement, she completed numerous assignments in the Balkans, Finland, and Africa, as well as highly creative commercial advertising work. Her personal life became intertwined with history when she married Armand Labin in 1940, a Jewish journalist of Romanian origin who joined the French Resistance.
During World War II, Bellon concealed her Jewish identity while living in Lyon, where she continued her photography work and created a remarkable visual record of the city under German occupation. In late 1944, she covered the Spanish Republican guerrillas who had retreated to the Aude region for the newspaper "Midi Libre," which Labin had founded at the request of the National Liberation Movement. Her wartime documentation extended to profoundly moving subjects: in 1945, she photographed the Jewish Scout house in Moissac, which had served as a refuge for Jewish children until 1943 and later welcomed Holocaust orphans after liberation.
Bellon's international perspective continued to grow in the postwar period. In 1947, she traveled to Djerba, Tunisia, where she captured a remarkable series of images documenting the Jewish community on the island. Her artistic connections, forged during her adolescence through friendships with the Maklès sisters, led her to frequent Georges Bataille, André Masson, and the Octobre group even before the war. André Breton entrusted her with covering Surrealist exhibitions, and the Denise Bellon archive documents works by notable artists including Victor Brauner, Frederick Kiesler, Wolfgang Paalen, and Sonia Mossé, who was deported to Sobibór in 1943.
Her portrait work captured many significant figures of her era, particularly Jewish artists from the School of Paris such as Moïse Kisling, Kurt Seligmann, and Antoine Pevsner. She also photographed writers with whom she maintained close relationships, including Joë Bousquet, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jacques Prévert, as well as filmmakers like Paul Grimault. Her artistic legacy continued through her daughters: Yannick became a film director, while Loleh pursued careers as both an actress and playwright.
Bellon's work demonstrates exceptional diversity and is characterized by an insatiable curiosity for both distant places and nearby unusual subjects, whether documenting a Roma wedding in the Zone or following the evolution of Surrealism. Breaking away from her family's bourgeois conventions, she brought a wandering perspective to the world, similar to other Jewish women photographers of her generation, including Lore Krüger, Gerda Taro, Denise Colomb, and Gisèle Freund.
The exhibition also promotes upcoming cultural events, including an "Ode to the Night" concert on October 24 at the Avignon Opera House, conducted by rising Venezuelan conductor Glass Marcano, winner of the La Maestra competition. The program features Wagner's Prelude and Death of Isolde arranged by Thomas Dorsch, Schoenberg's "Transfigured Night," and the premiere of a new orchestral work by composer-in-residence Fabien Cali. The Museum of Jewish Art and History retrospective offers visitors a comprehensive look at one of France's most important documentary photographers, whose work bridged art, journalism, and historical witness during some of the 20th century's most turbulent decades.
