Eli Lotar

French photographer and filmmaker of Romanian origin, Eli Lotar arrived in France in 1924. Close to Germaine Krull, who trained him, he published in most of the avant-garde magazines and participated in the major international exhibitions of the time. His famous series on the slaughterhouses of La Villette fascinated the Surrealists, first and foremost Georges Bataille who published it in his journal Documents. His dreamlike view of the city, his collages reconstituting images of fantasized cities show this elective affinity with surrealism. He is associated with Jacques-André Boiffard, collaborator of Roger Vitrac, Antonin Artaud and Prévert, friend of Alberto Giacometti and head of the photographic section of the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists. Also very sensitive to the social and political context of Europe in the 1930s, he photographed the workers of Zuiderzee, alongside the eponymous film by Joris Ivens, showed a desperate vision of the village of Hurdes alongside Luis Buñuel, and devoted his last film to the slums of Aubervilliers. Eli Lotar leaves us a body of work that concentrates all the audacity, inventiveness and commitment of the interwar period.

His decisive work is examined here in a new light, from the New Vision to documentary cinema, his wanderings through the city or bucolic landscapes, his portraits, in the studio or on location, or the capture of bodies in motion, without forgetting his social and political commitment.