The Inventive French Magazine That Published Legendary Photographers

“There was just one delicate catch,” Robert Delpire once remarked. “I had no competence.” Then twenty-four years old and studying to become a doctor, he had been asked by faculty to create a periodical aimed at medical professionals with an interest in art and culture as well as medicine. “No experience in publishing. Nothing even related,” Delpire continued. “I came from a milieu in which the word ‘culture’ didn’t exist. . . . So, in the unconsciousness of youth, I asked for texts from Claude Roy, Jacques Prévert, André Breton; photographs by Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Brassaï; drawings from André François, Saul Steinberg. And I was astonished to be so warmly welcomed.” Delpire was destined to be a publisher, not a surgeon.

For his new periodical, he chose the name NEUF. Perhaps this was because nine was the number on his basketball jersey, and he was an avid player. Or simply because neuf in French means “nine” but also “new.” NEUF would run for nine issues before ceasing publication in 1953 (it did not have enough subscriptions to sustain itself). But seventy years after publication, no complete collection of NEUF, public or private, exists; even the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s set is incomplete. To make the periodical accessible to photography enthusiasts and a larger public, delpire & co recently decided to reissue a facsimile of the original nine issues in a slipcase. The box set also contains a special supplement by art critic Michel Ragon titled Expression and Non-Figuration (1951), as well as another pamphlet with an essay by photography historian Michel Frizot.

To produce his magazine, Delpire was helped by his friends: Ragon and Pierre Faucheux, an innovative graphic designer. With their guidance and the support of the medical board dedicated to the arts, the cultural periodical was diverted to increasingly reflect Delpire’s eclectic interests. He learned day by day on the job, and NEUF evolved from issue to issue, giving greater room to photography until entire issues were dedicated to photographs of a selected theme (such as the heart, games, sport, the circus) or to an individual artist (such as Brassaï, Robert Frank, or, in the last issue, illustrator André François). To finance high-quality printing, Delpire obtained money from pharmaceutical companies who wanted their products shown in full-page ads, often in color, and he also persuaded them to assign his photographer friends to create visually striking advertisements. Paul Facchetti’s ad for a protein pill, for instance, features a surreal wicker mannequin projecting ominous shadows onto the background; for an ad for Mitosyl skin cream, a photographer who went by the name Casini made a compelling image of a tricolor snake emerging from its transparent molted skin.

The early issues reflect Delpire’s eclectic, whimsical taste, with its mix of illustrations, documentary photography, drawings, poetry, ethnography, and literature.

Delpire excelled as a photo researcher. He culled stock photographs from agencies or archives and often gave them the same full-page billing as photographs by recognized authors. He likened their unpolished charm to “a kind of raw state of photography.” For instance, in one image in the circus-themed issue, a trumpet-playing bear in the foreground looms over the circus master in a braided military tunic. In an issue dedicated to sports, the curved body of a diver is crowned with a cloud of bubbles, and the body of another swimmer, whose arms and legs we see from above, parallels an octopus’ twisted limbs. Their compositions and focuses may be imperfect, yet these photographs have the spur-of-the moment charm of amateur photographs found in family albums.

Still, NEUF relied on major photographers of the era, especially on humanists such as the Dutch photographer Carel Blazer, Brassaï, Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Izis, and George Rodger. Izis and Brassaï are featured with studio portraits of painters such as Raoul Dufy, Henri Matisse, and Marc Chagall. Other photographs by Izis show a melancholic street florist on a cold day, sitting in a tiny stand with hands warming in her muffs, and an extraordinary, surreal image of two socks suspended, like a hanged man’s legs, in front of an attic window with views of Paris roofs. Some of Doisneau’s strongest images—first published in his 1949 book, La Banlieue de Paris, with text by Blaise Cendrars—appear in a thematic issue about games: children, armed with sticks and a garbage-can lid as a giant shield, wage war in a desolate wasteland of smoke and fog. 

Delpire’s visit to Magnum Photos, the agency that had been recently established, yielded two important portfolios: George Rodger’s on the Nuba people of Sudan and their rituals, in which warriors, their limbs rubbed with ash, fight in a desolate landscape; and Cartier-Bresson’s “La Maison du muscle à Téheran (Muscle House in Tehran),” a competent but somewhat undistinguished and short reportage shot during a brief trip to Iran in 1950. The portfolio ends with a surprising pairing of an image of an Iranian man in training with a calligraphic ink drawing of dynamic silhouettes by Henri Michaux.

The early issues of NEUF reflect Delpire’s eclectic, whimsical taste, with its mix of illustrations, documentary photography, drawings, poetry, ethnography, and literature, but an abrupt change in editorial direction took place with issue number five. Dated December 1951, it focuses firmly on one artist, Brassaï, and his photography, drawings, and sculptures. The photographs are printed as full pages, with minimal captions grouped near the beginning; the only texts are passages from Brassaï’s memoir about his childhood, and articles by Henry Miller (“L’Oeil de Paris” is titled after his nickname for Brassaï, following the photographer’s 1932 publication Paris de nuit). On the red cover, two hoodlums appear as if emerging from behind a velvet theater curtain. Delpire deliberately mixed images from different series and periods of Brassaï’s work to create unusual visual connections. The reader’s gaze travels from image to image. When two images shot inside cafés are aligned, their characters seem to join to form a triangle. Two night photographs of a sex worker are shot from the back, then from the front, as if we were following the photographer as he circles his subject. Two little-known, surreal photos close the sequence: a still life of ivy cascading down a broken plaster statue, and a group of cornette-wearing nuns walking away under a vault of gigantic, lush saguaro.

Issue number seven is dedicated to the theme of the circus, with a beautiful photographic cover of acrobats by Blazer, and photos by Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson, and, for the first time, Robert Frank, who was almost unknown at the time and contributed images of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden. The most striking is perhaps a portrait of the famous clown Emmett Kelly: He faces us, holding a cigar in his outsized glove, and wears a wistful expression. His white face in full makeup is framed by the back of a black overcoat, worn by a man in a top hat. Frank’s diaristic-like vision, with offbeat, uncentered views, strongly differed from the style of photography usually championed by Delpire. Even so, the following issue would be dedicated solely to Frank’s study of Indigenous people in Peru. His images are empathetic and melancholy, not a classic reportage with a narrative but a loose wandering, where his drifting eye follows his subjects’ exiles and displacements. The accompanying text, however, by Georges Arnaud is shocking for its stark and racist view of these Native people.

In between the two world wars, photographs had often been used in art and literary journals, especially in George Bataille’s Documents or Albert Skira’s Minotaure, two Surrealism-oriented publications. But these photographs were mostly uncredited and often perceived as documents illustrating the texts; photographers were not considered authors. On the contrary, NEUF prioritized images from the beginning. Photographs occupy an essential place as works in their own right; they were printed full-page on thick, coated paper and credited to individual authors.

Issues of NEUF resemble books in progress and may collectively be viewed as a bridge between Delpire’s early work and his later career as an esteemed book publisher. Soon after NEUF, he went on to create his publishing house Delpire Éditeur, releasing many books that have since become classics: Brassai’s Séville en fête (Fiesta in Seville); Robert Frank’s Les Américains (The Americans); Josef Koudelka’s Gitans (Gypsies); William Klein’s Contacts; Werner Bischof’s Japan; Daido Moriyama’s Memories of a Dog; and many other volumes by Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Inge Morath, Marc Riboud, and George Rodger. Delpire’s series Photo Poche, of compact, low-priced monographs by well-known photographers, helped introduce generations of readers to photography. It now numbers close to two hundred volumes.

But looking back at the playful pages of NEUF, we can view the experimental ground on which the young publisher tried out his strengths and developed a feel for photographic sequencing, the expressions of typography, and collaborative teamwork. With this reissue, we are given the chance to observe how Delpire’s intuitive and eclectic vision developed on the page, first tentatively, then in leaps and bounds. “Luckily, my eye does not get worn,” he once wrote. And luckily for us today that it didn’t.

REVUE NEUF 1950–1953 was reissued by delpire & co in 2021.