We might as well say it from the outset : his name was Minot, Raoul Minot, and such a life deserves the spotlight. It took us almost four years to identify him, four years of exploring various avenues, considering everything, including giving up. But it’s now a certainty: This man, born on September 28, 1893, in Montluçon, central France, was indeed the mysterious photographer of 700 photos – most of them dated, numbered, with commentary – taken in Paris and its suburbs, at the risk of his life, between 1940 and 1942. It’s an exceptional collection, perhaps the richest on the French side – excluding propaganda – on the first two years of the Occupation.
Minot, then. An amateur, not a professional photographer. He was determined to bear witness in his own way, day by day, as he wandered in and around the capital. The enormity of his output – almost 1,300 prints, including multiples – makes it unique, totally different from the work of professionals like Roger Schall or Robert Doisneau, duly accredited by the authorities. Minot, on the other hand, had no employer in the press, and escaped all control. A ghost in the shadow of the Germans.
The story of how his name emerged from anonymity is worth telling. It was April 12, 2024, a Friday. On that day, the investigation launched by The World nearly four years earlier, based on a strange photo album found at a flea market in southern France, seemed to be bogged down. Of course, some progress had been made, and there had been some pleasant surprises, but the central enigma – the photographer’s identity – remained unsolved.
Before giving up, we wanted to take one last look at the information we’d gleaned about the only woman in the story: Renée Damien (1909-1990), a saleswoman in the perfume section of a Paris department store, Le Printemps, at the dawn of the 1940s. It was thanks to her that a small number of pictures (117) were preserved before being rescued from oblivion in 2018, in the Chartres region, thanks to the tenacity of a history enthusiast, Albert Hude. He gathered from Renée Damien’s son – an elderly man with a shaky memory – some initial biographical information on the Printemps saleswoman, as well as an intriguing but incomplete lead: according to the old man, now deceased, the author of these 117 photos was a friend of his mother’s whose name he did not know; arrested by the Germans, this unknown person has died in deportation, leaving no trace. Did he also work at Printemps? This theory, already envisaged during the investigation, merited a final check in the store’s archives, in search of information on the 1940-1942 period.
You have 91.9% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.
Related News :