Items

• Dominique Darbois
  Dominique Darbois (1925-2014) was the daughter of a major specialist of Asian arts and a novelist. She participated in the Free French Forces during the Second World War in 1941. Being a member of the resistance and Jewish, she was arrested and imprisoned at the Drancy camp for two years. In 1944, she continued to fight against the occupiers and received the Resistance Medal. In 1945 France was liberated and Darbois left for Indochina via Shanghai. Although she was only twenty, she had already lived several lives. After the war ended, she came back to France and became the assistant of the French photographer Pierre Jahan, which prompted her career as a photographer. In 1951, she organized an expedition to Amazonia and Guyana with Francis Mazière and Wladimir Ivanov, from which originated four publications: “Parana le petit Indien” (1952), “Les Indiens d’Amazonie” (1954), “Mission Tumuc-Humac” (1954), “Yanamalé village of the Amazon”. The first publication was translated into eight languages. She then began the collection "Enfants du monde” [Children of the world], a series of twenty volumes containing images and texts by Darbois herself. This collection offered a world tour not from an ethnographic standpoint but rather as a photographer committed to meet children in a world where not everyone was born equal. She surveyed over fifty countries. If she spent only a few days in Mongolia in 1957, she actually stayed much longer in China during the Hundred Flowers period [during which the Communist Party encouraged its citizens to openly express their opinions of the communist regime]. Thanks to the French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson – who photographed the last days of the political party Kuomintang in 1949 – she obtained a visa only a few people would get at that time. She accompanied an archaeological expedition that led her to photograph the Maijishan Grottoes in Gansu province as well as the Gobi Desert. She captured daily life in both cities and the countryside, while seizing traditions: acrobatics, games of chance, operas, puppets shows… and the new oil refineries around Lanzhou, oil wells around Yumen, political posters, and even the lives of prisoners in labour camps. In 1960 she published “Les Algériens en guerre” [Algerian at war]. She completed reportage on the maquis and the training camps of the National Liberation Front [the socialist political party in Algeria] in Tunisia. This reportage was forbidden in France. Darbois was interested in the moving world and in ancient civilizations. She published “Kaboul, le passé confisqué. Trésors du musée de Kaboul, 1931-1965” [Kabul, the confiscated past. Treasures of the Kabul Museum, 1931-1965] (2002). While she could have put aside her cameras, started to manage her archives, once again she committed herself to women in France and in Africa. She published then “Afrique, terre de femmes” [Africa, land of women] (2004) and “Terre d’enfants” [Children's Land] (2004), with a text written by Pierre Amrouche. This was her ultimate work.
• John Thomson
  John Thomson was a Scottish photographer who pioneered photojournalism in the 1870s. Thanks to his extensive travels through all over China and South-East Asia he brought the culture and people of the Far East closer to Western audiences. His subjects ranged from ethnography to antiquities, beggars and street people through to Princes, from Imperial Palaces to remote monasteries, and from rural villages to the grandeur of the Gorges. His style is distinguished by the quality and the directness with which he represented landscapes and social practices.
• Charles Nouette
  Charles Nouette was originally a self-taught photographer who only later became familiar with archaeological methods. Biographical information regarding Nouette is rather scarce, except from the obituary Pelliot wrote on his memory in 1910. Thanks to this we know that Nouette was originally an electrician and that an illness had prevented him from continuing in this profession. He then dedicated his life to photography and this combined with his scientific knowledge and natural ingenuity attracted the attention of various contemporaries, notably Pelliot. According to L’Annuaire du Commerce et de l’Industrie Photographiques of 1902, Nouette had a studio located at 22 rue Henri Barbusse (former rue Denfert-Rochereau) in the fifth arrondissement in Paris. His studio’s presentation says: “Agrandissement et réduction de plans, machines, architecture, bijoux, étoffes, en un mot toutes photographies ayant pour objet les catalogues et les épreuves à conserver ou à graver. (…) Tous formats. – Prix suivant format et difficulté. » Nouette contracted tuberculosis during his trip in China, and died six months after he returned to Paris, while he was still developing Pelliot’s expedition photographs. Nouette was forty-one. He is buried at the Monthléry cemetery. Information concerning the initial encounter between Pelliot and Nouette remains unknown. Primary sources only mention that Pelliot contacted Nouette during an early stage of his preparations for the expedition and asked him to serve as its main operator. Letters exchanged between 1905 and 1906 also revealed that the two men discussed in detail the photographic equipment that would be suitable for the expedition. The particular attention paid to photography from the preparation phase was related to the new methodological emphasis and value ascribed to photography in the archaeological field. In the same way that these kinds of expeditions were multidisciplinary, Nouette had multiple duties. Pelliot’s notebooks describe that amongst other duties he also checked on the workers that excavated the sites, drew schematic plans of grottoes, took some rubbings and managed the bulk of mails to be delivered. Yet his role as the operator of the mission appeared to be his most prominent position.
• Stéphane Passet
  Passet – was a mounted police officer, and her mother – Jeanne Mondiere – was a housewife. Biographical elements remain quite meagre. What is known is that he volunteered in the French Army on 1st October 1895, in which he stayed fifteen years. He had a variety of duties, including driver, corporal, sergeant, and sergeant major. He left the military for the civilian sector on 15th November 1910 and moved to Ivry-sur-Seine in the suburbs of Paris. Two years later in 1912, he started to work for Kahn’s Archives de la Planète. The circumstances of his previous training as a photographer and cameraman, as well as his recruitment, remain unknown. The visual archive left to us today reveal that two trips in China were organised in 1912 (between May and August) and 1913 (between the end of May and the end of June). Passet and his team travelled across China, visiting and recording places such as Beijing (which composes a large part of the archive in China) and northern sites (Great Wall and Ming Tombs), Shenyang, Zhangjiakou, Qufu, Shanghai, places along the Yangtze River, and Mount Tai (hereinafter referred to as Taishan). Similar to the other operators working on behalf of Kahn, Passet received special training in Paris beforehand by the appointed the geographer Jean Brunhes (1869-1930), head of the project. Brunhes handled the necessary paperwork to obtain funding and authorisation to travel in the countries, while organising ‘preparatory meetings’ that consisted of intensive courses in Kahn’s own private mansion. Passet died on 7 July 1941 in his home in Evian.