Mac Orlan, Pierre (Pierre Dumarchey; 1882-1970), French novelist, poet, and writer on photography. His central preoccupation, articulated in stories like Quai des brumes (1927; famously filmed by Marcel Carné in 1938), was the opposition between immemorial ways of life, and marginal people like itinerant entertainers, and the rationalism of the modern city. As a critic, he celebrated the monochrome photograph's ability to capture details that betrayed the mysterious, secret life of cities—what he termed the ‘social fantastic’—behind their monumental and functional façades. This was best pursued in ‘those popular quarters where bars loom into view out of the fog’; and especially at night: ‘Photography makes use of light to study shadow. It reveals the people of the shadow. It is a solar art at the service of night.’ Such sentiments explain his enthusiasm for photographers like Brassaï and Kertész; for Atget, for whose first published collection of photographs he wrote an introduction (1930); and for Ronis, whose pictures of Belleville-Ménilmontant he described as ‘poems of the street’. He also had a long association with the poetic realist Marcel Bovis (1904-97), whose suburban nocturnes, with their wet cobblestones and fog-muffled lamps (e.g. Rue Brancion, 1931), were inspired by Mac Orlan's writings. Conversely, Bovis was the natural illustrator for his circus poems, Fêtes foraines (1990).
— Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Phillips, C. (ed.), Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940 (1989)
