Lecture
A Photographer in the Library – Cartier-Bresson and “His” Writers
Saturday, November 14, 2026Lecture by Sophie Doudet
An avid reader, close to the Surrealists, and a friend of Truman Capote and Carson McCullers, photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson sometimes exchanged his camera for pencil and pen. He was a man of images, but also of letters. He portrayed many famous writers, including Colette, Faulkner, Beckett—and also Sartre and Camus. The lecture will focus specifically on a comparative analysis of the portraits of these literary arch-rivals of the twentieth century, in an attempt to understand the singularity of the photographer’s gaze. How does the art of portraiture—which Henri Cartier-Bresson described as the most difficult for him because “it placed a question mark over someone”—depict Camus’s and Sartre’s personalities with such acuity and humanity? How does he uniquely suggest what deeply united them, and later divided them, in the context of the Cold War?
About the speaker
Sophie Doudet
Sophie Doudet is a senior lecturer in French literature at the Institute of Political Studies in Aix-en-Provence, where she has taught general culture, literature, and the history of art and ideas since 2001. She has written biographies of Winston Churchill, André Malraux, Madame de Staël, and Abbé Pierre for Gallimard’s “Folio Biographies” collection. She is also the author of young adult novels published by Scrineo about Rimbaud, Churchill, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. Finally, she contributed to the creation of the exhibition Camus, Citizen of the World, held in Aix-en-Provence in 2013.