Jean Marquis, surveyor of the everyday. Photographs 1951-1983

In 1951, Robert Capa advised Jean Marquis (1926-2019), an actor and drama teacher, to look into photography. He had an eye for it. Three years later, he joined the Magnum Photos agency alongside Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Chim.

From streets to fields, factories to haymaking, Liverpool to Budapest, Algerian colonists to the camel drivers of the Touggourt market and the Clos Salembier shantytown (1958), Jean Marquis surveyed everyday life: Pierre Mendès France's press review on a train, bread-making in the village, Jean Renoir directing actors for French Cancan.
Jean Marquis orders space, arranges his characters, and frames with mastery: the hardworking crowd of Merlebach returning home, old ladies with piercing eyes on Rue du Petit Musc, a lone railway worker along the Deûle, his first major "initiatory" reportage for Magnum.

The photographs assert themselves in the obviousness of their slice of life, symbols of the ancestral customs of Corrèze, attestations of the modernity of the Trente Glorieuses, and documents of the permanence of struggles.

Edward Steichen, director of the MoMA photography department, spotted him and selected him for the exhibition The Family of Man in 1955. Numerous retrospectives followed in institutions in France and abroad.

Jean Marquis covered social and artistic effervescence: sit-in strikes, workplace meetings, and various demonstrations in favor of causes dear to him: support in Paris at Place de la Nation for the Rosenbergs on death row in the United States (1953), the funeral of protesters for peace in Algeria, victims of the repression at the Charonne metro station (1962), the social unrest of May 1968, a general assembly of farmers (1983), jazz, shows, film shoots; he was present for History.
With a watchful eye, he captured youth and its protest surge in the Latin Quarter; André Malraux, exhausted, taking his final bow from the political stage during the last Gaullist demonstration at the Arc de Triomphe (May 30, 1968).

The press appreciated and published him. He began a regular collaboration with L'Express, Science et Vie, Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune Magazine, and Life. Covers multiplied: actress Gina Lollobrigida for Robert Siodmak's Le Grand Jeu for Match (1954), a former prisoner of the extermination camps in a striped shirt for Life (1958), Brigitte Bardot, the global star, for L'Express (1962)…

Louis Aragon invited him to follow him in the wanderings of his anthology of poems Il ne m'est Paris que d'Elsa (1963). Jean Marquis captured the animation of Parisian streets, Montmartre still as it was before with its windmill.

Europe, Iran, Senegal, Algeria; Jean Marquis traveled as a special envoy for the international press. In Lapland (1956), he was at the height of his art in the intimacy of the Sami people, at the heart of their traditions and customs. He translated the wild and tender happiness of the children, the carefreeness of their games, and the glow of their parents' quiet beauty like a lifeline, a mark of his empathy, of a discreet but profound ethic at the source of his work.

In 2011, Jean Marquis entrusted the distribution of his photographs to the Roger-Viollet agency, from which a collection was sourced from the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris.