19 Facts About Constant Puyo

Emile Joachim Constant Puyo was a French photographer, active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

For most of his career, Puyo was associated with the Photo Club of Paris, serving as its president from 1921 to 1926.

Constant Puyo's photographs appeared in numerous publications worldwide, and were exhibited at various expositions in the 1900s.

Constant Puyo was born to a prominent bourgeois family in Morlaix in 1857.

Constant Puyo's father, Edmond Puyo, was a painter, amateur archaeologist, and politician, who served as Mayor of Morlaix in the 1870s.

Constant Puyo's uncle, Edouard Corbiere, was a best-selling author, and his cousin, Tristan Corbiere, was a well-known poet.

Constant Puyo studied at the Ecole Polytechnique before joining the French Army as an artillery officer, rising to the rank of commandant during his career, and commanding a squadron at the School of Artillery at La Fere.

Constant Puyo served with the French Army in Algeria during the 1880s.

In 1894, Constant Puyo joined the Photo Club of Paris, which had been founded by Maurice Bacquet, and helped organize a Salon for the club.

Constant Puyo wrote several articles for the club's Bulletin, establishing himself as the chief theoretician of the French Pictorialist movement.

Constant Puyo wrote or co-wrote several books for the club during this period describing these processes in detail.

Constant Puyo retired as Photo Club president in 1926, and returned to his home in Morlaix.

Constant Puyo died in 1933, and is interred with his family at the Cemetiere Saint-Martin-du-Morlaix.

Constant Puyo believed that for a photograph to be considered art, it must create a beauty independent of the subject, and thus believed art photographers should be more concerned with beauty rather than fact.

Constant Puyo considered the manipulation of a photograph to be an expression of individuality, and believed that manipulation was necessary to eliminate the sense that the photograph was produced by an unemotional machine.

Common themes in Constant Puyo's photographs include landscapes, female figures in various poses, and various aspects of late 19th-century Parisian life.

Constant Puyo was greatly influenced by artistic movements of the day, especially Impressionism.

One of Constant Puyo's better known works, Montmartre, was inspired by Edvard Munch's Rue Lafayette.

Constant Puyo's work has been exhibited at museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Centre Atlantique de la Photographie in Brest.