Louÿs, Pierre (1870-1925), French writer who achieved early notoriety with his ‘Sapphic’ Chansons de Bilitis (1894) and novel Aphrodite (1896). But his interests, friendships, journeys, and other writings reveal a much more intriguing character. Between 1890 and 1896, before his marriage to Louise de Hérédia, he photographed intensively, mainly using a small Kodak. He portrayed his friends Jean de Tinan, Debussy, and Mallarmé and recorded his numerous visits to North Africa. But his most personal, original, and, because of its subject matter, least-known series of pictures was created in his Paris flat: portraits of very young girls, female friends, mistresses, or models in provocative or obscene poses. Most of them are locked away in private collections. Precisely staged, strong, aesthetically pleasing, and—unusual for this kind of picture—often poetic, they are intimately linked to Louÿs's intense personal life and compulsion to record his sexual experiences. They form part of an obsessive collection that includes other, acquired photographs, notes, poems, and interminable lists of specialized vocabulary.
— Sylvie Aubenas
Bibliography
- Goujon, J.-P., ‘Pierre Louÿs, photographe érotique’,
La Recherche photographique , 5 (1988)
