Studio 5 and the Carrière legacy

A recent discovery, drawn from an autobiographical account by photographer Gilles Walusinski published in 2018 in the online cultural magazine délibéré, sheds light on another little-known chapter in the history of 34 boulevard de Clichy: the occupation of studio 5 by a collective of young photographers in the aftermath of May 1968, and the presence in the building of a resident linked by marriage to the symbolist painter Eugène Carrière (1849-1906).

The Vaugirard School collective at studio 5 (June 1969)

Gilles Walusinski (born 1948) is a French documentary photographer, contributor to délibéré magazine, former member of the Rapho agency and Hopikat, long committed to social issues (Roma, homeless people, the Paris tramway). He notably published, with Juliette Keating, the investigation À la rue (Éditions L'Ire des marges, 2017) on the eviction of thirteen Roma families in Montreuil in 2016.

Walusinski was in 1968 a student at the school known as "Vaugirard", rue de Vaugirard / rue Littré (today's École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière). During the États généraux du cinéma et de la photographie ("General Estates of Cinema and Photography") held in May-June 1968, the school was transformed into a place of political debate. At the end of his studies, in June 1969, five classmates decided to pool their means of production — that is, "their lack of means" — and rented together a studio at 34 boulevard de Clichy: studio 5.

Walusinski describes the place as: a "lovely little dead-end at the foot of Montmartre, trees and artists' studios on one side of the alley, an apartment building on the other side". The studio had been fitted out for photography by a previous occupant, with a small darkroom installed and a mezzanine as a daylight studio — equipment that must have served the previous occupant for "racy" photographs of the young women working in the Pigalle neighbourhood, as attested by prints left in a corner of the darkroom.

This description provides several precious pieces of information about the material organisation of the courtyard at no. 34 in the late 1960s. Studio 5 had a fitted photographic darkroom and a mezzanine as a daylight studio — equipment bequeathed by an unknown earlier occupant, evidently a practitioner of neighbourhood erotic photography (consistent with Pigalle sociology since the early 20th century). In 1970-1971, the owner sold the studio for 30,000 francs (worth about €35,000 in 2025 terms) — a sum out of reach of the collective of five photographers, who had to leave the premises.

Nane, third-floor neighbour

During the year the collective occupied studio 5, a resident of no. 34 entered Walusinski's life: Nane, "a charming lady, lived in the building, on the third floor, offered us tea, talked to us about photography because she worked for our landlord". This Nane is the first occupant of no. 34 documented for the period after the POPP census records of 1936.

Several biographical elements emerge from Walusinski's account:

• Nane lived on the 3rd floor of the street-side building of 34 boulevard de Clichy at the end of the 1960s.
• She worked for the owner of no. 34, of whom Walusinski writes that he "proved as adept at flogging fake originals to publishers as at collecting our rent to wipe out his deficit" — which suggests a trade in art editions or photographic prints.
• When the owner sold studio 5, Nane found a better-paid job at the Rapho agency — a photographic cooperative founded in 1933 in Paris by Charles Rado, which welcomed Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Brassaï and Sabine Weiss.
• Nane lived with a certain "Mr. Carrière" and their daughter. The couple separated in the years that followed.

The 1970 gift — a fragment of the Carrière-Nadar collection

One day, Nane — bereaved and alone after Mr. Carrière's departure, and after watching from her window a sparrow being seized by a falcon — invited Walusinski to tea and offered him a box that she had kept in her bedroom. The box contained three precious items:

The second item is a worn copy of Quand j'étais photographe ("When I was a photographer", Ernest Flammarion, 1899), Félix Nadar's autobiographical anthology. The copy bore a handwritten dedication from Nadar to Eugène Carrière: "who knows how to paint better than the eyes, the gaze…" followed by this pirouette: "refrain of an old song, the ugliest Nadar can give only what he has!…" Proof of the real friendship binding the two men in 1905, the year before the painter's death.

The third document is a handwritten condolence letter signed "P. Nadar" — that is, Paul Nadar (1856-1939), son and continuator of the studio — addressed to Eugène Carrière's widow (Sophie-Marie Adam, known as Sophie). Walusinski notes that the signature "imitates" that of his father Félix: "the P being only added in pursuit of a continued celebrity for the boulevard des Capucines studio, photography having also become a business". The letter was folded in two, slipped into the book.

Hypothesis — Nane, daughter-in-law or relative of Eugène Carrière

Eugène Carrière and Félix Nadar — a fin-de-siècle friendship

The object of Nane's gift to Walusinski is, on its own, an important document in the history of late-19th-century French art. Eugène Carrière (1849-1906), a symbolist painter and lithographer from Gournay-sur-Marne, trained in Alexandre Cabanel's studio at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, is known for his sfumato painting with brown to black backgrounds and for his intimate portraits — Verlaine (1890, Louvre), Edmond de Goncourt on his deathbed (Musée d'Orsay), Maurice Rollinat, Alphonse Daudet. Rejected by the Impressionists for his "twilight" tone, he nevertheless exerted an influence on emerging Fauvism through his academy.

Félix Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, 1820-1910), the most famous French photographer of the 19th century, established his studio at 113 rue Saint-Lazare and then, from 1860, at 35 boulevard des Capucines — the studio where the first Impressionist exhibition was held in April 1874. Around 1895, ruined, he passed the studio on to his son Paul Nadar (1856-1939) — hence the specific signature of the print given to Walusinski.

The friendship between Carrière and Félix Nadar is attested by the handwritten dedication of 1905 (one year before the painter's death), preserved in the book given to Walusinski. It is part of the extraordinary social network that Nadar maintained with Parisian artists — from the Panthéon Nadar (1854) to the last portraits of Sarah Bernhardt, taking in Baudelaire, Hugo, Manet and Berlioz.

The Nadar print given to Walusinski in 1970 has been identified as presenting a slightly different framing from that reproduced in the 1979 Hubschmid edition (page 202) — Nadar would take several views during a single funeral session "to be sure of the result". The photograph of the Carrière widow preserved by Nane therefore probably belongs to a different state of the same negative, or to a sister negative, which increases its documentary interest.

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