

images that haunt us






Fabienne Cravan Lloyd (Fabi) was the daughter of the Swiss writer, poet and boxer Arthur Cravan (born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd; 1887 – disappeared 1918) and the British-born artist (painter, writer and lamp designer) Mina Loy (born Mina Gertrude Löwy; 1882–1966).
After the disappearance of Arthur Cravan, Loy travelled back to England (from Buenos Aires), where she gave birth to her daughter, Fabienne, named after her father, on 5 April 1919.
Fabi (Fabienne), having inherited her parents’ artistic talent, but perhaps less of their volatility and wanderlust, worked as a designer, married twice, and had four children. As a seventy-eight-year-old widow, unwell and nearly blind, she committed suicide in 1997. Immortality, of a sort, had been secured more than half a century earlier, thanks to the cameras of her mother’s famous friends Man Ray and Carl Van Vechten. Their photographs of a young Fabi reveal a watchful, dark-haired girl with a perfect profile, an air of steely calm, and an eerie resemblance to the father she never met. (text adapted from Lapham’s Quarterly: The Vanishing Pugilist and the Poet. The marriage of twentieth-century avant-gardists Arthur Cravan and Mina Loy was blissfully happy—until his mysterious disappearance.)





























The Biederer Studio was founded and managed by the Czech born brothers Jacques Biederer (1887-1942) and Charles Biederer (1892-1942). The photographic studio was specialized in erotic and fetish photography. It was active in Paris in the period between the two world wars.






