Nicole LALA*

Nicole Lala (1934–2015) was a French photographer whose name is associated with the French humanist photography movement. Throughout her life, she developed a deeply sensitive perspective on her time and on the people who inhabited it.

In 1960, Nicole Lala began her career as a photojournalist for the magazine Regards, where she was one of only two female photographers responsible for covering current events. Equipped with her Rolleiflex and Exacta Varex cameras, she travelled throughout France, Corsica and Spain, photographing the daily lives of workers, farmers, craftspeople and fishermen. She brought back 4,000 photographs that bear visual witness to the everyday lives of working people.

She later became a film set photographer, accompanying the productions of leading figures in French cinema. Alongside these commissioned assignments, Nicole Lala developed a more personal body of work, attentive to her immediate surroundings: the streets of Paris, her friends, children, people experiencing homelessness, and others.

When she died in 2015, Nicole Lala left behind an exceptional archive of nearly 20,000 black-and-white photographs and their negatives, as well as 970 prints made by the photographer herself. While some of her images were published in Regards or used to promote the films she worked on, a large part of her work remained unknown to the public for many years. At the heart of this body of work is also an intimate story: the bond between Nicole Lala and her only daughter, Delphine Bonnet, whom she photographed from the day of her birth until she was 26 years old.

This photographic corpus will soon be published in Lala, je te vois où que tu sois, by Éditions du Chêne. Written by her daughter, Delphine Bonnet, and prefaced by Marie Robert, Chief Curator at the Musée d’Orsay, the book tells the story of a photographer, but also that of a mother and daughter. To coincide with the publication of the book, the exhibition Through Lala’s Eye will be presented at La Fab, with the opening taking place on September 24.

This exhibition offers an opportunity to discover, through a selection of photographs, Nicole Lala’s sensitive and deeply personal world, and to restore to this long-overlooked body of work the place it deserves.