After Robert Doisneau and Willy Ronis, the City of Issy-les-Moulineaux, a stone’s throw from Paris, continues its policy of enabling its fellow citizens to discover humanist photography featuring 59 photographs by Edouard Boubat in the Museum of the playing card (Musée de la carte à jouer), thanks to Florian Goutagneux.

In referring to Edouard Boubat, we cannot avoid the qualifying terms by Jacques Prévert, a hundred times referred to as “correspondent of peace” but also by Kathleen Grosset, daughter of Barbara and Raymond Grosset –the Rapho Family– “Edouard was above all a poet in all instants of his life. We would drink coffee together, and all of a sudden, he would get up, grab his old worn bag and would declare in an inspired tone: I’m leaving! We would never know if he was returning home or leaving to the other end of the world”. For Agatha Gaillard, whose gallery is selling his works “He was a photographer that loved his photographs. He always had postcards in his bag that he would give out generously”. Kathleen Grosset confirms “Often, he would lay a postcard or one of his photos on my desk and would announce: Isn’t it beautiful? It was not, as we could understand from pretension, but it was the expression of a real sincerity. He would talk about his photographs as if they weren’t his”.

Michel Puech