Henriette Grindat

Henriette Grindat (1923–1986), born in Lausanne, was one of the most outstanding Swiss photographers of the 20th century. Her subjective photographic poetry inspired artists and writers alike. As the 3rd of July 2023 marks what would have been Henriette Grindat’s 100th birthday, this photographer’s collaboration with René Char and Albert Camus is the focus of a new exhibition at Fotostiftung Schweiz.

The oeuvre of Henriette Grindat (1923–1986) occupies a special position in the history of Swiss photography. In the 1950s, while many of her colleagues represented an objective style and were producing committed reportage for high-circulation magazines, Grindat developed a very subjective visual language that was influenced by surrealism. Her artistic expressiveness can be compared to that of modernist Swiss photographer Jakob Tuggener (1904–1988). However, her name is still little known – especially in German-speaking Switzerland. Grindat’s estate is housed at Fotostiftung Schweiz, where it has been comprehensively critically incorporated and was presented in a 2008 retrospective exhibition, accompanied by a publication. Henriette Grindat would have turned 100 on the 3rd of July 2023. Fotostiftung Schweiz is taking this centenary as an opportunity to shed light on an important body of work by this photographer, which she realised together with writers Albert Camus and René Char.

After her training at Gertrude Fehr’s photography school in Lausanne and Vevey, Henriette Grindat sought exchanges with artists and literary figures – sometimes also in Paris. There, she met her future husband in 1949, Swiss etcher Albert-Edgar Yersin (1905–1984), and became acquainted with French poet René Char (1907–1988), whose texts she admired. Char had been in the surrealists’ extended milieu during the 1930s and had fought in the resistance as a maquisard during the Second World War. His background in the resistance is something he had in common with author Albert Camus (1913–1960). From 1946 onwards, these two writers were united by friendship and their love of the Vaucluse region in Provence. Char was from L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, a small town east of Avignon, where he took up residence after the war; Camus would sometimes rent a country house in the area.

La Postérité du soleil
Impressed by Grindat’s pictures, they devised a plan to use photographs and texts to reproduce the mood of that landscape, which evidently reminded Camus of his homeland in Algeria. In 1950, Henriette Grindat went on excursions in and around L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, accompanied by Char. She photographed intuitively, scanning the surfaces of vegetation, topography and buildings, finding quiet scenes that seemed to detach themselves from the time and place. In 1952, Camus wrote short poetic paragraphs about 30 of her photographs, reflecting on the subtlest of details. The interplay is extraordinary: The language evolves out of the images and opens up a new dimension within them. Nevertheless, no publisher could be found for this collaborative work at first, which was entitled La Postérité du soleil (The Posterity of the Sun). It was only after the death of Camus in 1960 that interest in the unpublished work arose. In 1965, Geneva-based publisher Edwin Engelberts produced a large-format portfolio containing gelatin silver prints of Grindat’s photographs, along with Camus’s texts and a foreword by Char. La Postérité du soleil did not appear as a book until 1986, the year in which Henriette Grindat took her own life and two years before René Char’s death.

The portfolio sheets from 1965 are on display in this exhibition, for which the original accompanying French texts by Albert Camus have been comprehensively translated into German for the first time.

Publishing history of La Postérité du soleil
Alongside the large-format portfolio La Postérité du soleil, Edwin Engelberts produced a small accordion fold-out in 1965: It contains an afterword by René Char, in which he tells of his friendship with Albert Camus and the joint project with Henriette Grindat, as well as a 1956 portrait of Camus taken by Grindat. In 1977, Office du Tourisme de L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue printed a brochure featuring 10 of the photographs and texts. In 1986, the complete work was released in book form, once again by Geneva-based gallery owner and publisher Edwin Engelberts. Finally, in 2009, a book edition was published by Gallimard – the publishing house with which Camus was closely associated and which was in charge of his complete works. At the same time, an Italian translation of La Postérité du soleil was released in the journal In forma di parole. To date, there is no German edition.

Letters from René Char and Albert Camus
The letters from René Char and Albert Camus in Henriette Grindat’s estate provide information on how this joint project came about. Writer Henri Thomas had apparently encouraged Henriette Grindat to send René Char some of her photographs. The latter replies in September 1949 and expresses interest in getting mutually acquainted. In April 1950, Char reports that he has shown her photographs to his friend Albert Camus and proposes a collaboration. Grindat’s visit to L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue is planned for August, and by September they are already exchanging remarks on the “results”. Char records an initial selection of images and proposes the title La Postérité du soleil at the beginning of 1951. Work on the text is then delayed because both writers are otherwise engaged. Camus contacts the photographer directly in 1952, but this is already about a subsequent project – pictures to accompany a lyrical essay from his anthology Noces: Camus expresses criticism of Grindat’s photographs of the Algerian town Tipaza (which he would later, in 1953, decide not to use). In the same letter, he mentions that he is in the process of finalising the texts for La Postérité du soleil.

While Char’s correspondence with Grindat has a friendly tone, Camus comes across as formal and reserved. It is evident that during the 1950s, efforts to find a publisher for La Postérité du soleil were mainly undertaken by the photographer, albeit unsuccessfully. After Camus’s fatal car accident, his widow Francine contacts Grindat in writing and expresses interest in publishing the work.

Texts by Albert Camus
Stylistically, the texts that Albert Camus wrote to accompany Grindat’s photographs differ from his well-known work. While his famous 1940s novels La Peste (The Plague) and L’Etranger (The Stranger) tended towards clear concise language, which played a part in his being styled an existentialist poet, the lyrical form that he arrives at here is poetically very dense. Camus examines the photographs very closely and weaves extremely diverse associations into his verbal imagery. He imagines scenes taking place at the depicted locations, but repeatedly switches to an abstract philosophical level that, by means of its timelessness, removes the texts and images from any specific topography. While it seems that Char and Camus initially had a joint text piece in mind, Char ultimately took on the role of editor; he wrote the introduction, made minor changes to the text here and there, and extended the paragraph on the portrait of a woman, which was included in the 30-part series of pictures despite the two writers’ reservations. For the portfolio realised in 1965, Char ended up writing an afterword entitled Naissance et jour levant d’une amitié, in which he pays tribute to his deceased friend. He describes Camus’s instinctive sense of attachment to the landscape and people of Vaucluse, as conveyed in his texts. The fact that La Postérité du soleil was only published after the death of Camus may also have had something to do with the latter’s hesitancy. According to his wife and the publisher Edwin Engelberts, he was afraid that this lyrical voice, which was atypical for him, might be misunderstood.

Negatives and new prints
Henriette Grindat did not personally produce the gelatin silver prints for the portfolio, of which 123 copies were made. Apparently, the selected images’ negatives never made it back to Grindat’s archives; to this day, they have not been found. However, the negatives of the photographs that were not used for La Postérité du soleil have been preserved. Newly produced archival pigment prints featuring a number of motifs can be seen in this display case. Unlike the pictures in the portfolio, each of these shows the entire negative. Henriette Grindat exposed square negatives, which she then cropped in portrait formats for the publication.