Puyo, Émile Constant

French, 1857-1933

BiographyÉmile Joachim Constant Puyo was a major figure of French Pictorialism, a photography movement in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries that emulated the Impressionistic style of painting. He studied at the Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau, Essonne, France, before becoming a career officer in the French army. He began taking photographs as an amateur around 1890, and he joined the Photo-Club de Paris in 1894, founded by Robert Demachy and Maurice Bucquet in 1888 to promote the aesthetics of pictorialism. The pictorialist movement championed the manipulation of photographs as a means of creating images not simply in recording reality, but as expressions of beauty and emotion on par with other art forms. To render photographs less sharp, Puyo used diffused light, designed soft-focus lenses, and perfected the gum bichromate and oil transfer printing processes, which may be used to manipulate photographs and create painterly effects. Women posed with flowers or situated in idyllic landscapes were favorite subjects of the pictorialists, whose images often sought to create a feminine ideal. Puyo’s work was printed in pictorialist publications such as Die Kunst in der Photographie, and he wrote several articles for the Photo-Club’s publication, Bulletin. He co-organized the first salon of photographic work based on the aesthetic principles of the Photo-Club in 1894, and he published several books on the art of photography and photographic printing. Puyo was also a member of the Société Française de Photographie and the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, an international photography organization based in London. With the outbreak of World War I, Demachy withdrew from photography, but Puyo continued to be the primary voice of the Photo-Club, even as its influence and the dominance of Pictorialism began to wane. Puyo retired from the military in 1902 and devoted himself to photography, serving as president of the Photo-Club from 1921 to 1926.

A major exhibition of Puyo’s work was held at the Centre Atlantique de la Photographie in Brest, France in 2008 to 2009, entitled Constant Puyo (1857-1933), Entre volonté d’art et intuition photographique. His work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.