Roger Corbeau
Roger Corbeau was born in Haguenau, Alsace. Attracted to the sacred monsters of cinema from a very young
age, he decided in 1932 to come to Paris and begin working as a prop director for Roger Richebé films. Marcel
Pagnol discovered his talent and took him on as a film set photographer in 1933. They worked together for six
years. His demanding approach to photography and to actors and his original talent soon launched him into
the world of cinema. He subsequently worked on more than 160 films with top directors, including Abel Gance,
Claude Chabrol, Jean Cocteau, Robert Bresson and Orson Welles. His work is a vibrant tribute to film actors
from the 1930s to the 1980s.
Roger Corbeau, however, was not a film set photographer in the traditional sense of the term. Very quickly
he went beyond his role in order to impose his own vision of the actors and film, never hesitating to act as
a director. Fascinated by faces, Corbeau developed his talent to perfection, combining an acute sense of
drama and a search for an ideal of beauty. The importance he gave to the quality of the printed photographs,
characterized both by softness of tone and density contributed to the aesthetic value of his portraits, enigmatic
or even disturbing.
